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i^tantiarti Hibrarp ambition

THE WORKS OF
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

ILLUSTRATED WITH STEEL PORTRAITS
AXD PHOTOGRAVURES

VOLUME IV

Elmivood, Mr. Lowell's Home at Lambridgt

LITERARY ESSAYS

AMONG MY BOOKS, MY STUDY

WINDOWS, FIRESIDE

TRAVELS

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

IN FOUR VOLUMES
VOLUME IV.

BOSTON AND NEW YORK

HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY

^\)t Ritcrjgilie ^1X0?, Cambnboe

Copyright, 1871, 1876, 1890,
By JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL.

AU rights reserved.

P5

S300

The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A.
Electrotyped and Printed by II. 0. Iloughton & Company.

CONTENTS

Pope 1

Milton 58

DAiTTE 118

Spenser 265

wordswobth 354

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

PAQB

Elstwood, Mr. Lowell's Home at

Casibridge 1 Frontispiece

Alexander Pope 50

John Milton 100

Dante 200

Edmund Spenser 278

William Wordsworth 354

> From a photograph copyrighted by B. F. Mills, Cambridge, Mass.

LITERARY ESSAYS

POPE

1871

In 1675 Edward Phillips, the elder of Milton's
nephews, published his Hieatrum Poetarum. In
his Preface and elsewhere there can be little doubt
that he reflected the sesthetic principles and liter-
ary judgments of his now illustrious uncle, who had
died in obscurity the year before.^ The great poet
who gave to English blank verse the grandeur and
compass of organ-music, and who in his minor poems
kept alive the traditions of Fletcher and Shake-
speare, died with no foretaste, and yet we may
beheve as confident as ever, of that " immortality
of fame " which he tells his friend Diodati he was
" meditating with the help of Heaven " in his
youth. He who may have seen Shakespeare, who
doubtless had seen Fletcher, and who perhaps per-
sonally knew Jonson,^ lived to see that false school
of writers whom he qualified as " good rhymists,
but no poets," at once the idols and the victims of
the taste they had corrupted. As he saw, not with-

^ This was Thomas Warton's opinion.

2 Milton, a London boy, was in his eighth, seventeenth, and
twenty-ninth years, respectively, when Shakespeare (1616), Flet-
cher (1625), and B. Jonson (1637) died.

2 POPE

out scorn, how they found imiversal hearing, while
he slowly won his audience fit though few, did he
ever thiuk of the hero of his own epic at the ear of
Eve ? It is not impossible ; but however that may
be, he sowed in his nephew's book the dragon's
teeth of that long war which, after the lapse of
a century and a half, was to end in the expidsion
of the usurping dynasty and the restoration of the
ancient and legitimate race whose claim rested on
the grace of God. In the following passage surely
the voice is IVIilton's, though the hand be that of
Phillips : " Wit, ingenuity, and learning in verse,
even elegancy itself, though that comes nearest, are
one thing ; true native poetrj is another, in which
there is a certain air and spirit, which, perhaps,
the most learned and judicious in other arts do not
perfectly apprehend ; much less is it attainable by
any art or study." The man who speaks of ele-
gancy as coming nearest, certainly shared, if he was
not repeating, the opinions of him who thirty years
before had said that " decorum " (meaning a higher
or organic unity) was " the grand masterpiece to
observe " in poetry.^

It is upon tliis text of Phillips (as Chalmers has
remarked) that Joseph Warton bases his classifi-
cation of poets in the dedication to Young of the first
volume of his essay on the Genius and Writings of
Pope, published in 1756. That was the earliest pub-
lic and official declaration of war against the reign-
ing mode, though private hostilities and reprisals had
been going on for some time. Addison's panegyric

^ 111 his Tractate on Education.

POPE 8

of Milton in the Spectator was a criticism, not the
less damaging because indirect, of the superficial
poetry then in vogue. His praise of the old bal-
lads condemned by innuendo the artificial elabora-
tion of the drawing-room pastoral by contrasting it
with the simple sincerity of nature. Himself inca-
pable of being natural except in prose, he had an in-
stinct for the genuine virtues of poetry as sure as
that of Gray. Thomson's " Winter " (1726) was a
direct protest against the literature of Good Society,
going as it did to prove that the noblest society
was that of one's own mind heightened by the
contemplation of outward nature. What Thomson's
poetical creed was may be surely inferred from his
having modelled his two principal poems on Milton
and Spenser, ignoring rhyme altogether in the
" Seasons," and in the " Castle of Indolence " reject-
ing the stiff mould of the couplet. In 1744 came
Akenside's " Pleasures of Imagination," whose very
title, like a guide-post, points away from the level
highway of commonplace to mountain-paths and
less domestic prospects. The poem was stiff and
unwilling, but in its loins lay the seed of nobler
births, and without it the " Lines written at Tintern
Abbey " might never have been. Three years later
Collins printed his little volume of Odes, advocat-
ing in theory and exemplifying in practice the nat-
ural supremacy of the imagination (though he called
it by its older name of fancy) as a test to distin-
guish poetry from verse-making. The whole Roman-
tic School, in its germ, no doubt, but yet unmistaka-
bly foreshadowed, lies already in the " Ode on the

4 POPE

Superstitions of the Higlilands." He was the first
to bring back into poetry something of the antique
fervor, and found again the long-lost secret of being
classically elegant without being pedantically cold.
A skilled lover of music,^ he rose from the general
sing-song of his generation to a harmony that had
been silent since Milton, and in him, to use his own
words,

" The force of energy is found,
And the sense rises on the wings of sound."

But beside his own direct services in the reforma-
tion of our poetry, we owe him a still greater debt
as the inspirer of Gray, whose " Progress of Poesy,"
in reach, variety, and loftiness of poise, ovei^flies
all other English Iji-ics like an eagle. In spite of
the dulness of contemporary ears, preoccupied with
the continuous hum of the popular hurdy-gurdy,
it was the prevailing blast of Gray's trumpet that
more than anything else called men back to the
legitimate standard.^ Another poet, Dyer, whose

^ Milton, Collins, and Gray, our three great masters of harmony,
Xvere all musicians.

2 Wordsworth, who recognized forerunners in Thomson, Collins,
Dyer, and Burns, and who chimes in with the popular superstition
ah out Chatterton, is always somewhat niggardly in his appreciation
of Gray. Yet he owed him not a little. Without Gray's tune in
his ears, his own noblest Ode would have missed the varied mod-
ulation which is one of its main charms. Where he forgets Gray,
his verse sinks to something like the measure of a jig. Perhaps the
suggestion of one of his own finest lines,

(" The light that never was on land or sea,")
was due to Gray's

" Orient hues unborrowed of the sun."
I believe it has not been noticed that among the verses in Grav'a

POPE 6

" Fleece " was published in 1753, both in the choice
of his subject and his treatment of it gives further
proof of the tendency among' the younger genera-
tion to revert to simpler and purer models. Plainly
enough, Thomson had been his chief model, though
there are also traces of a careful study of Milton.
Pope had died in 1744, at the height of his
renown, the acknowledged monarch of letters, as
supreme as Voltaire when the excitement and ex-
posure of his coronation-ceremonies at Paris has-
tened his end a generation later. His fame, like
Voltaire's, was European, and tlie style which he
had carried to perfection was paramount through-
out the cultivated world. The new edition of the

Sonnet on the Death of West, which Wordsworth condemns as of
no value, the second —

' ' And reddening Phoebus lifts his golden fires " —
is one of Gray's happy reminiscences from a poet in some respects
greater than either of them : —

*' Jamque rubrum tremulis jubar ignibus erigere alte
Cum coeptat natura."

Lncret., iv. 404, 405.
Gray's taste was a sensitive divining-rod of the sources whether of
pleasing or profound emotion in poetry. Though he prized pomp,
he did not undervalue simplicity of subject or treatment, if only
the witch Imagination had east her spell there. Woi-dsworth loved
solitude in his appreciations as well as in his daily life, and was
the readier to find merit in obscurity, because it gave him the plea-
sure of being a first discoverer all by himself. Thus he addresses
a sonnet to John Dyer. But Gray was one of " the pure and power-
ful minds " who had discovered Dyer during his lifetime, when the
discovery of poets is more difficult. In 1753 he writes to Wal-
pole : ' ' Mr. Dyer has more poetry in his imagination than almost
any of our number, but rougli and injudicious." Dyer has one fine
verse, —

" On the dark level of adversity."

6 POPE

" Dunciad," with the Fourth Book added, pub-
lished the year before his death, though the sub-
stitution of Gibber for Theobald made the poem
incoherent, had yet increased his reputation and
confirmed the sway of the school whose recognized
head he was, by tlie poignancy of its satire, the lu-
cidity of its wit, and the resoimding, if somewhat
uniform, march of its numbers. He had been
translated into other languages living and dead,
Voltaire had long before pronounced him " the
best poet of England, and at present of all the
world." ^ It was the apotheosis of clearness, point,
and technical skill, of the ease that comes of prac-
tice, not of the fulness of original power. And
yet, as we have seen, while he was in the very plen-
itude of his power, there was already a wides]iread
discontent, a feeling that what " comes nearest,"
as Phillips calls it, may yet be infinitely far from
giving those profounder and incalculable satisfac-
tions of which the soul is capable in poetry. A
movement was gathering strength which prompted

" The age to quit their clogs
By the known rules of ancient liberty."

Nor was it wholly confined to England. Symptoms
of a similar reaction began to show themselves on
the Continent, notably in the translation of Milton
(1732) and the publication of the Nibelungen Lied
(1757) by Bodmer, and the imitations of Thomson
in France. Was it possible, then, that there was

^ MS. letter of Voltaire, cited by Warburton in his edition of
Pope, vol. iv. p. ;JS, note. The date is loth October, 1726. I do
not find it in Voltaire's Correspondence.

POPE 7

anything better than good sense, elegant dietion,
and the highest polish of stjle ? Could there be
an intelleetual appetite which antithesis failed to
satisfy ? If the horse would only have faith enough
in his green spectacles, surely the straw woidd ac-
quire, not only the flavoi-, but the nutritious proper-
ties of fresh grass. The horse was foolish enough
to starve, but the public is wiser. It is surprising
how patiently it will go on, for generation after
generation, transmuting dry stubble into verdure
in this fashion.

The school which Boileau founded was critical
and not creative. It was limited, not only in its
essence, but by the capabilities of the French lan-
guage and by the natural bent of the French mind,
which finds a predominant satisfaction in phrases
if elegantly turned, and can make a despotism, po-
litical or aesthetic, palatable with the pepper of
epigram. The style of Louis XIV. did what his
armies failed to do. It overran and subjugated
Europe. It struck the literature of imagination
with palsy, and it is droll enough to see Voltaire,
after he had got some knowledge of Shakespeare,
continually endeavoring to reassure himself about
the poetry of the grand siecle^ and all the time
asking himself, " Why, in the name of all the gods
at once, is this not the real thing ? " He seems to
have felt that there was a dreadful mistake some-
where, when poetry must be called upon to prove
itself inspired, above all when it must demonstrate
that it is interesting, all appearances to the con-
trary notwithstanding. Difficulty, according to

8 POPE

Voltaire, is the tenth Muse ; hut how if there were
difficulty in reading as well as writing? It was
something, at any rate, which an increasing number
of persons were perverse enough to feel in attempt-
ing the productions of a pseudo-classicism, the clas-
sicism of red heels and periwigs. Even poor old
Dennis himself had arrived at a kind of muddled
notion that artifice was not precisely art, that there
were depths in human nature which the most per-
fectly manufactured line of five feet could not
sound, and passionate elations that could not be
tuned to the lullaby seesaw of the couplet. The
satisfactions of a conventional taste were very well
in their own way, but were they, after all, the high-
est of which men were capable who had obscurely
divined the Greeks, and who had seen Hamlet,
Lear, and Othello upon the stage ? Was not
poetry, then, something which delivered us from
the dungeon of actual life, instead of basely recon-
ciling us with it ?

A century earlier the school of the cultists had
established a dominion, ephemeral, as it soon ap-
peared, but absolute while it lasted. Du Bartas,
who may, perhaps, as fairly as any, lay claim to its
paternity,^ had been called divine, and similar hon-
ors had been paid in turn to Gongora, Lilly, and
Marini, who were in the strictest sense contempo-
raneous. The infection of mere fashion will hardly

^ Its taste for verbal affectations is to be found in tlie Roman
de la Rose, and (yet more absurdly forced) in Gauthier de Coinsy ;
but in Du Bartas the research of effect not seldom subjugates the
thought as well as the phrase.

POPE 9

account satisfactorily for a vogue so sudden and so
widely extended. It may well be suspected that
there was some latent cause, something at work
more potent than the fascinating mannerism of
any single author in the rapid and almost simul-
taneous diffusion of this purely cutaneous eruption.
It is not improbable that, in the revival of letters,
men whose native tongues had not yet attained the
precision and grace only to be acquired by long
literary usage, should have learned from a study of
the Latin poets to value the form above the sub-
stance, and to seek in mere words a conjuring prop-
erty which belongs to them only when they catch
life and meaning from profound thought or power-
ful emotion. Yet this very devotion to expression
at the expense of everything else, though its ex-
cesses were fatal to the innovators who preached
and practised it, may not have been without good
results in refining language and fitting it for the
higher uses to which it was destined. The cultists
went down before the implacable good sense of
French criticism, but the defect of this criticism
was that it ignored imagination altogether, and
sent Nature about her business as an impertinent
baggage whose household loom competed unlaw-
fully with the machine-made fabrics, so exquisitely
imiform in pattern, of the royal manufactories.
There is more than a fanciful analogy between the
style which Pope brought into vogue and that
which for a time bewitched aU ears in the latter
half of the sixteenth century. As the master had
made it an axiom to avoid what was mean or low,

10 POPE

so the disciples endeavored to escape from what was
common. This they contrived by the ready expe-
dient of the periphrasis. They called everything
something else. A boot with them was

" The shining leather that encased the limb " ;

coffee became

" The fragrant juice of Mocha's berry brown " ;

and they were as liberal of epithets as a royal
christening of proper names. Two in every verse,
one to balance the other, was the smallest allow-
ance. Here are four successive verses from " The
Vanity of Human Wishes " : —

"The encumbered oar scarce leaves the dreaded coast
Through jBU/yj/e billows and & floating host.
The bold Bavarian in a luckless hour
Tries the dread summits of Ccesarian power."

This fashion perished also by its own excess, but
the criticism which laid at the door of the master
all the faults of his pupils w^as unjust. It w-as de-
fective, moreover, in overlooking how much of what
we call natural is an artificial product, above all in
forgetting that Pope had one of the prime qualities
of a great poet in exactly answering the intellect-
ual needs of the age in which he lived, and in
reflecting: its lineaments. He did in some not in-
adequate sense hold the mirror up to nature. His
poetry is not a mountain-tarn, like that of Words-
worth; it is not in sympathy with the higher
moods of the mind ; yet it continues entertaining,
iu spite of all changes of mode. It was a mirror in
a drawing-room, but it gave back a faithful image

POPE 11

of society, powdered and rouged, to be sure, and
intent on trifles, yet still as liiinian in its own way
as the heroes of Homer in theirs.

For the popidarit}' of Pope, as for that of Marini
and his sect, circumstances had prepared the way.
English literature for half a century after the Res-
toration showed the marks both of a moral reaction
and of an artistic vassalage to France. From the
compvdsory saintship and cropped hair of the Puri-
tans men rushed or sneaked, as their temperaments
dictated, to the opposite cant of sensuality and a
wilderness of peri^^^g. Charles II. had brought
back with him from exile French manners, French
morals, and above all French taste. Misfortune
makes a shallow mind sceptical. It had made the
king so ; and this, at a time when court patronage
was the main sinew of authorship, was fatal to the
higher qualities of literature. That Charles should
have preferred the stately decorums of the French
school, and should have mistaken its polished man-
nerism for style, was natural enough. But there
was something also in the texture of the average
British mind which prepared it for this subjuga/-
tion from the other side of the Channel. No ob-
server of men can have failed to notice the clumsy
respect which the understanding pays to elegance
of manner and savoir-faire, nor what an awkward
sense of inferiority it feels in the presence of an
accomplished worldliness. The code of society is
stronger with most persons than that of Sinai, and
many a man who would not scruple to thrust his
fingers in his neighbor's pocket would forego green

12 POPE

peas rather than use his knife as a shovel. The
submission with which the greater number surren-
der their natural likings for the acquired taste of
what for the moment is called the World is a higldy
curious phenomenon, and, however destructive of
originality, is the main safeguard of society and
nurse of civility. Any one who has witnessed the
torments of an honest citizen in a foreign gallery
before some hideous martyrdom which he feels it
his duty to admire, though it be hatefid to him as
nightmare, may well doubt whether the gridiron of
the saint were hotter than that of the sinner. It
is only a great mind or a strong character that
knows how to respect its own provincialism and
can dare to be in fashion with itself. The bewil-
dered clown with his " Am I Giles ? or am I not? "
was but a type of the average man who fmds him-
self uniformed, drilled, and keeping step, whether
he will or no, with the company into which destiny
or chance has drafted him, and which is marching
him inexorably away from everything that made
him comfortable.

The insularity of England, while it fostered pride
and reserve, entailed also that sensitiveness to ridi-
cule which haunts pride like an evil genius. " The
English," says Barclay, writing half a century be-
fore the Restoration, " have for the most part
grave minds and withdrawn, as it were, into them-
selves for counsel ; they wonderfully admire them-
selves and the manners, genius, and spirit of their
own nation. In salutation or in wi-iting they en-
dure not (unless haply imbued with foreign man-

POPE 13

ners) to descend to those words of imaginary ser-
vitude which the refinement (hlandities) of ages
hath invented.'' ^ Yet their fondness of forei2:n
fashions had long been the butt of native satirists.
Every one remembers Portia's merry picture of the
English lord : " How oddly he is suited ! I think
he bought his doublet in Italy, his round hose in
France, his bonnet in Germany, and his behavior
everywhere." But while she laughs at his bun-
ghng efforts to make himself a cosmopolite in ex-
ternals, she hints at the persistency of his inward
Anglicism : " He hath neither Latin, French, nor
Italian." In matters of taste the Anglo-Saxon
mind seems always to have felt a painful distrust
of itself, which it betrays either in an affectation
of burly contempt or in a pretence of admiration
equally insincere. The young lords who were to
make the future court of Charles II. no doubt found
in Paris an elegance beside which the homely blunt-
ness of native manners seemed rustic and under-
bred. They frequented a theatre where propriety
was absolute upon the stage, though license had its
full swing behind the scenes. They brought home
with them to England debauched morals and that
urbane discipline of manners which is so agreeable
a substitute for discijjline of mind. The word
*' genteel " came back with them, an outward symp-
tom of the inward change. In the last generation,
the men whose gi-eat aim was success in the Other
World had wrought a political revolution ; now,
those whose ideal was prosperity in This World
^ Barclaii Sutyricon, p. .382. Barclay had lived in France.

14 POPE

were to have their turn and to accomplish with
their lighter weapons as great a change. Before
the end of the seventeenth century John BuU was
pretty well persuaded, in a bewildered kind of way,
that he had been vidgar, and especially that his
efforts in literature showed marks of native vigor,
indeed, but of a vigor clownish and uncouth. He
began to be ashamed of the provincialism which
had given strength, if also something of limitation,
to his character.

Waller, who spent a whole summer in polishing
the life out of ten lines to be written in the Tasso
of the Duchess of York, expresses the prevailing
belief as regarded poetry in the prologue to his
" improvement " of the " Maid's Tragedy " of
Beaumont and Fletcher. He made the play rea-
sonahle^ as it was called, and there is a pleasant
satire in the fact that it was refused a license be-
cause there was an immoral king in it. On tlie
throne, to be sure, — but on the stage ! Forbid it,
decency !

" Above our neighbors' our conceptions are,
But faultless writing is the effect of care ;
Our lines reformed, and not composed in haste,
Polished like marble, would like marble last.

*' Were we but less indulgent to our fau'ts,
And patience had to cultivate our thoughts,
Our Muse would flourish, and a nobler rage
Would honor this than did the Grecian stage."

It is a curious comment on these verses in favor
of careful writing, that Waller shoidd have failed
even to express his own meaning either clearly or

POPE 15

with propriety'. He talks of " cultivating our
thoughts," when he means " pruning our style " ;
he confcunds the ]Muse with the laurel, or at any
rate makes her a plant, and then goes on with pex'-
fect equanimity to tell us that a nobler " rage "
(that is, madness) than that of Greece would fol-
low the hoi'ticultiu'al devices he recommends. It
never seems to have occurred to Waller that it is
the substance of what you polish, and not the polish
itself, that insures duration. Dryden, in his rough-
and-ready way, has hinted at this in his verses to
Congreve on the " Double Dealer." He begins by
stating the received theory about the improvement
of English literature under the new regime^ but
the thin ice of sopliistry over which Waller had
glided smoothly gives way under liis greater weight,
and he finds himself in deep water ere he is aware.

" Well, then, the promised hour has come at last,
The present age in wit obscures the past ;
Strong were our sires, and as they fought they writ,
Conquering with force of arm ^ and dint of wit.
Theirs was the giant race before the Flood ;
And thus when Cliaries returned our Empire stood ;
Like Janus he the stubborn soil manured,
With rules of husbandry the rankness cured.
Tamed us to manners when the stage was rude,
And boisterous English wit with art endued ;
Our age was cultivated thus at length,
But what we gained in skill we lost in strength ;
Our builders were with want of genius curst,
The second temple was not like the first."

There would seem to be a manifest reminiscence of

^ Usually printed arms, but Dryden certainly wrote arm, to
correspond with dint, which he used in its old meaning of a down-
right blow.

16 roPE

Waller's verse in the hulf-scornful emphasis wliicli
Dryden lays on " cultivated." Perhaps he was at
first led to give greater weight to correctness and
to the restraint of arbitrary rules from a conscious-
ness that he had a tendency to hyperbole and ex-
travagance. But he afterwards became convinced
that the heightening of discourse by passion was a
very different thing from the exaggeration which
heaps phrase on plirase, and that genius, like
beauty, can always plead its privilege. Dryden, by
his powerful example, by the charm of his verse
which combines vigor and fluency in a measure
perhaps never reached by an}' other of our poets,
and above all because it is never long before the
sunshine of his cheerful good sense breaks through
the clouds of i-hetoric, and gilds the clipped hedges
over which his thought clambers like an unpruned
vine, — Dryden, one of the most truly English of
English authors, did more than all others com-
bined to bring about the triumphs of French stand-
ards in taste and French principles in criticism.
But he was always like a deserter who cannot feel
happy in the \4ctories of the alien arms, and wlio
»vould go back if he could to the camp where he
naturally belonged. Between 1660 and 1700 more
French words, I believe, were directly transplanted
into our language than in the century and a half
since. What was of more consequence, French
ideas came with them, shaping the form, and
through that modifying the spirit, of our literature.
Voltaire, though he came later, was steeped in the
theories of art which had been inherited as tradi-

POPE 17

tions of classicism from the preceding generation.
He had lived in England, and, I have no doubt,
gives US a very good notion of the tone which was
j)revalent there in his time, an English version of
the criticism iuiported from France. He tells us
that Mr. Addison was the first Englishman who
had written a reasonahle tragedy. And in spite
of the growling of poor old Dennis, whose sandy
pedantry was not ^\^thout an oasis of refreshing
sound judgment here and there, this was the opin-
ion of most persons at that day, except, it may be
suspected, the judicious and modest Mr. Addison
himself. Voltaii-e says of the English tragedians,
— and it will be noticed that he is only jmtting,
in another way, the opinion of Dryden, — " Their
productions, almost all barbarous, without polish,
order, or probability, have astonishing gleams in
the midst of their night ; ... it seems sometimes
that nature is not matle in England as it is else-
where." £h bieii, the inference is that we must
try and make it so ! The world must be uniform
in order to be comfortable, and what fashion so
becoming as the one we have invented in Paris ?
It is not a little amusing that when Voltaire played
master of ceremonies to introduce the hlzarre
Shakespeare among his countrymen, that other
kind of nature made a profounder impression on
them than quite pleased him. So he turned about
presently and called his whilome jprotege, a buffoon.
The condition of the English mind at the close
of the seventeenth centiiry was such as to make
it particularly sensitive to the magnetism which

18 POPE

streamed to it from Paris. The loyalty of every»
body both in politics and religion had been put out
of joint. A generation of materialists, by the nat-
ural rebound which inevitably follows over-tension,
was to balance the ultra-spiritualism of the Puri-
tans. As always when a political revolution has
been wrought by moral agencies, the plunder had
fallen mainly to the share of the greedy, selfish,
and unscmpulous, whose disgusting cant had given
a taint of hj^^ocrisy to piety itself. Religion, from
a burning conviction of the soul, had grown to be
with both parties a political badge, as little typical
of the inward man as the scallop of a pilgiim.
Sincerity is impossible, unless it pervade the whole
being, and the pretence of it saps the very foun-
dation of character. There seems to have been
an universal scepticism, and in its worst form, that
is, with an outward conformity in the interest of
decorum and order. There was an unbelief that
did not believe even in itseK.

The difference between the leading minds of the
former age and that which was supplanting it went
to the veiy roots of the soul. Milton was willing
to peril the success of his crowning work by mak-
ing the poetry of it a stalking-horse for his theolog-
ical convictions. What was that Fame

'■ Which the clear spirit doth raise
To scorn delights and live laborious days,"

to the crown of a good preacher who sets

" The hearts of men on fire
To scorn the sordid world and unto heaven aspire " ?

Dean Swift, who aspired to the mitre, could wi-ite

POPE 19

a book whose moral, if it had any, was that one
religion was as good as another, since all were po-
litical devices, and accepted a cure of souls when
it was more than doubtful whether he believed that
his fellow-creatures had any soids to be saved, or,
if they had, whether they were worth saving. The
answer which Pidci's ]Margutte makes to Morgante,
when asked if he believed in Christ or Mahomet,
woidd have expressed well enough the creed of the
majority of that generation : —

" To tell thee truly,
My faith in black "s no greater than in azure,
But I believe in capons, roast-meat, bouilli,
And in good wine my faith 's beyond all measure." ^

It was a carnival of intellect without faith, when
men could be Protestant or Catholic, both at once,
or by turns, or neither, as suited their interest,
when they cotdd swear one allegiance and keep on
safe terms \dt\x the other, when prime ministers
and commanders-in-chief eoidd be intelligencers of
the Pretender, nay, when even Algernon Sidney
himself could be a pensioner of France. What
morality there was, was the morality of appear-
ances, of the side that is turned toward men and
not toward God. The very shamelessness of Con-
greve is refreshing in that age of sham.

It was impossible that anything tridy great, that
is, great on the moral and emotional as well as
the intellectual side, should be produced by such
a generation. But something intellectually great
could be and was. The French mind, always
^ Morgante, xviii. 115.

SiO POPE

stronger in perceptive and analytic than in imagi-
native qualities, loving jjivcision, gi-ace, and finesse,
prone to attribute an almost magical power to the
scientific regulation whether of politics or reli-
gion, had brought wit and fancy and the elegant
arts of society to as great perfection as was pos-
sible by the a priori method. Its ideal in litera-
ture was to conjure passion within the magic circle
of courtliness, or to combine the appearance of
careless ease and gayety of thought with intellect-
ual exactness of statement. The eternal watchful-
ness of a wit that never slept had made it distrust-
fid of the natural emotions and the imconventional
expression of them, and its first question about a
sentiment was, Will it be safe? about a phrase,
Will it pass wath the Academy? The effect of its
example on English literature would appear chiefly
in neatness and facility of turn, in point and epi-
grammatic compactness of phrase, and these in con-
veying conventional sentiments and emotions, in
appealing to good society rather than to human
nature. Its influence would be greatest where its
success had been most marked, in what was called
moral poetry, whose chosen province was manners,
and in which satire, with its avenging scourge, took
the place of that profounder art whose office it was
to purify, not the manners, but the source of them
in the soul, by pity and terror. The mistake of
the whole school of French criticism, it seems to
me, lay in its tendency to confound what Avas com-
mon with what wms vulgar, in a too exclusive def-
erence to authority at the expense of all free
movement of the mind.

POPE 21

There are certain defects of taste wlilcli correct
themselves bv their own extravarrance. LanuuaLre,
I suspect, is more apt to be reformed by the cliarm
of some master of it, like iSIilton, than by any
amount of precept. The influence of second-rate
wi'iters for exH is at best ephemeral, for true style,
the joint residt of culture and natural aptitude, is
always in fashion, as fine manners always are, in
whatever clothes. Perhaps some reform was needed
when Quarles, who had no mean gift of poesy,
could A\Tite,

' ' My passion has no April in her eyes :
I cannot spend in mists ; I cannot mizzle ;
My fluent brains are too severe to drizzle
Slight drops." ^

Good taste is an excellent thing when it confines
itself to its own rightfid province of the proprie-
ties, but when it attempts to correct those profound
instincts out of whose judgments the higher princi-
I>les of aesthetics have been formulated, its success
is a disaster. During the era when the French
theory of poetry was supreme, we notice a decline
from imagination to fancy, from passion to w4t,
from metaphor, which fuses image and thought in
one, to simile, which sets one beside the other, from
the supreme code of the natural sympathies to the

^ Elegie on Doctor Wilson. But if Quarles had been led astray
by the vices of Donne's manner, he had g-ood company in Herbert
and Vaughan. In common with them, too, he had that luck of
simpleness which is even more delightful than wit. In the same
poem he says, —

" Go, glorious soul, and lay thy temples down
In Abram's bosom, in the sacred down
Of soft eternity.''''

22 POPE

parochial by-laws of etiqiiette. The imagination
instinctively Platonizes, and it is the essence of
poetry that it should be unconventional, that the
soul of it should subordinate the outward parts ;
while the artificial method proceeds from a princi-
ple the reverse of this, making the spirit lackey the
form.

Waller preaches up this new doctrine in the
epilogue to the " Maid's Tragedy " : —

" Nor 13 't less strange such mighty wits as those
Should use a style in tragedy like prose ;
Well-sounding verse, where princes tread the stage,
Should speak their virtue and describe their rage."

That it should be beneath the dignity of princes
to speak in anything but rhyme can only be paral-
leled by Mr. Puff's law that a heroine can go deco-
rously mad only in white satin. Waller, I sup-
pose, though with so loose a thinker one cannot be
positive, uses " describe " in its Latin sense of lim-
itation. Fancy Othello or Lear confined to this
go-cart ! Phillips touches the true point when he
says, " And the truth Is, the use of measure alone,
without any rime at all, would give more scope and
liberty both to style and fancy than can possibly
be observed in rime." ^ But let us test Waller's
method by an example or two. His monarcli made
reasonahle, thus discourses : —

" Courage our greatest failings does supply,
And makes all good, or handsomely we die.
Life is a thing of common use ; by heaven
As well to insects as to monarchs given ;
But for the crown, 't is a more sacred thing ;

^ Preface to the Theatrum.

POPE 23

1 11 dying lose it, or I "11 live a king-.

Come, Diphiliis, %ve nnist together -walk

And of a matter of importance talk." \_ExeUTU,

Blank verse, where the sentiment is trivial as here,
merely removes prose to a proper ideal distance,
where it is in keeping with more impassioned parts,
hut commonplace set to this rocking-horse jog
irritates the nerves. There is nothing here to re-
mind lis of the older tragic style but the exeunt at
the close. Its pithy conciseness and the relief
which it bx'ings us from his majesty's prosing give
it an almost poetical savor. Aspatia's reflections
upon suicide (or " sujapressing ovu* breath," as she
calls it), in the same play, will make few readers
regi'ct that Shakespeare was left to his own unas-
sisted barbarism when he wrote Hamlet's soliloquy
on the same topic : —

" 'T was in compassion of onr woe
That nature first made poisons grow,
For hopeless Avretehes such as I
Kindly providing means to die :
As mothers do their children keep,
So Nature feeds and makes us sleep.
The indisposed she does invite
To go to bed before 't is night."

Correctness in this case is but a synonyme of mo-
notony, and words are chosen for the number of
their syllables, for their rubbishy value to fill-in,
instead of being forced upon the poet by the mean-
ing which occupies the mind. Language becomes
useful for its diluting properties, rather than as
the medium by means of which the thought or
fancy precipitate themselves in crystals upon a

24 POPE

connecting thread of purpose. Let us read a few
verses from Beaiiuiont and Fletdier, that we may
feel fully the difference between the rude and the
reformed styles. This also shall be a speech of As-
patia's. Antiphila, one of her maidens, is working
the story of Theseus and Ariadne in tapestry, for
the older masters loved a picturesque background
and knew the value of fanciful accessaries. Aspa-
tia thinks the face of Ariadne not sad enough : —

" Do it "by nie,
Do it again by me, the lost Aspatia,
And you shall find all true but tbe wild island.
Suppose I stand upon the seabeach now,
Mine arms thus, and my hair blown with the wind,
Wild as that desert ; and let all about me
Be teachers of my story. Do my face
(If ever thou hadst feeling of a sorrow)
Thus, thus, Antiphila ; strive to make me look
Like sorrow's monument ; and the trees about me
Let them be dry and leafless ; let the rocks
Groan with continual smges ; and behind me
Make all a desolation."

Wliat instinctive felicity of versification ! what sob-
bing breaks and passionate repetitions are here !

We see what the direction of the new tendency
was, but it would be an inadequate or a dishonest
criticism that should hold Pope responsible for the
narrow compass of the instrument which was his
legacy from his immediate predecessors, any more
than for the wearisome thrumming-over of liis tune
by those who came after him and who had caught
his technical skill without his genius. The question
properly stated is. How much was it i)ossiblc to
make of the material supjDlied by the age in wliich

POPE 26

he lived ? ami liow uuuli did he make of it? Thus
far, among the great English poets who preceded
him, we have seen actual life represented by Cliau-
eer, imaginative life by Spenser, itleal life by
Shakesi)eare, the interior life by Milton. But as
everything aspires to a rhythmical utterance of it-
self, so conventional life, itself a new phenomenon,
was waiting for its poet. It found or made a most
fitting one in Pope. He stands for exactness of
intellectual expression, for perfect propriety of
phrase (I speak of him at his best), and is a strik-
ing instance how much success and permanence of
reputation depend on conscientious fuilsh as well as
on native endowment. Butler asks, —

" Then why should those who pick and choose
The best of all the best compose,
And join it by Mosaic art,
In graceful order, part to part.
To make the whole in beauty suit,
Not merit as complete repute
As those who, with less art and pain.
Can do it with their native brain ? "

Butler knew very well that precisely what stamps
a man as an artist is this power of finding out what
is " the best of all the best."

I confess that I come to the treatment of Pope
with diffidence. I was brought up in the old sujier-
stition that he was the gi-eatest poet that ever
lived ; and when I came to find that I had instincts
of my own, and my mind was brought in contact
with the apostles of a more esoteric doctrine of
poetry, I felt that ardent desire for smashing the
idols I had been brought up to worship, without

26 POPE

any regard to their artistic beauty, which character-
izes youthful zeal. What was it to me that Pope
was called a master of style ? I felt, as Addison
says in his Freeholder when answering an argu-
ment in favor of the Pretender because he could
speak English and George I. could not, " that I did
not wish to be tyrannizetl over in the best Eng-
lish that ever was spoken." The young demand
thoughts that find an echo in their real and not
their acquired nature, and care very little al)Out the
dress they are put in. It is later that we learn to
like the conventional, as we do olives. There was
a time when I could not read Pope, but disliked
him on principle, as old Roger Ascham seems to
have felt about Italy when he says, " I was once in
Italy myself, but I thank God my abode there was
only nine days."

But Pope fills a very important place in the his-
tory of English poetry, and must be studied by
every one who would come to a clear knowledge of
it. I have since read over every line that Pope
ever wrote, and every letter written by or to him,
and that more than once. If I have not come to
the conclusion that he is the greatest of poets, I be-
lieve that I am at least in a condition to allow him
every merit that is fairly his. I have said that
Pope as a literary man represents precision and
grace of expression ; but as a poet he represents
something more, — nothing less, namely, than one
of those eternal controversies of taste which will
last as long as the imagination and understanding
divide men between them. It is not a matter to be

POPE 27

settled by any amount of argument or demonstra-
tion. There are born Popists or "Worclsworthians,
Loekists or Kantists, and there is nothing more to
be said of the matter.

Wordsworth was not in a condition to do Pope
justice. A man brought up in sublime mountain
solitudes, and whose nature was a solitude more
vast than they, walking an earth which quivered
with the throe of the French Kevolution, the child
of an era of profound mental and moral movement,
it coidd not be expected that he should be in sym-
pathy with the poet of artificial life. Moreover, he
was the apostle of imagination, and came at a time
when the school which Pope founded had degener-
ated into a mob of mannerists who ^vrote with ease,
and who with their congenial critics united at once
to decry poetry which brought in the dangerous
innovation of having a soul in it.

But however it may be with poets, it is very cer-
tain that a reader is happiest whose mind is broad
enough to enjoy the natural school for its nature,
and the artificial for its artificiality, provided they
be only good of their kind. At any rate, we must
allow that the man who can produce one perfect
work is either a great genius or a very lucky one ;
and so far as we who read are concerned, it is of
secondary importance which. And Pope has done
this in the " Rape of the Lock." For wit, fancy,
invention, and keeping, it has never been surpassed.
I do not say there is in it poetry of the highest
order, or that Pope is a poet whom any one would
choose as the companion of his best hours. There

28 POPE

is no inspiration in it, no trumpet-call, but for pure
entertainment it is unmatched. There are two
kinds of genius. The first and highest may be said
to speak out of the eternal to the present, and must
compel its age to understand it ; the second under-
stands its age, and tells it what it wishes to be told.
Let us find strength and inspiration in the one,
amusement and instruction in the other, and be
honestly thankful for both.

The very earliest of Pope's productions give indi-
cations of that sense and discretion, as well as wit,
which afterward so eminently distinguished him.
The facility of expression is remarkable, and we
find ^so that perfect balance of metre, which he
afterward carried so far as to be wearisome. His
pastorals were written in his sixteenth year, and
their publication immediately brought him into no-
tice. The following four verses from his first pas-
toral are quite characteristic in their antithetic
balance : —

"You that, too wise for pride, too good for power,
Enjoy the glory to be great no more,
And carrying with you all the world can boast,
To all the world illustriously are lost ! "

The sentiment is affected, and reminds one of that
future period of Pope's Correspondence with his
Friends, when Swift, his heart corroding with dis-
appointed ambition at Dublin, Bolingbroke raising
delusive turnips at his farm, and Pope pretend-
ing not to feel the lampoons which imbittered his
life, played together the solemn farce of affecting
indifference to the world by which it would have

POPE 29

agonized them to be forgotten, and wi'ote letters
addressed to each other, but really intended for that
posterity whose opinion they assumed to despise.

In these pastorals there is an entire want of na-
ture. For example, in that on the death of Mrs.
Tempest : —

" Her fate is whispered by tlie gentle breeze
And told in sighs to all the trembling trees ;
The trembling trees, in every plain and wood,
Her fate remurmnr to the silver flood ;
The silver flood, so lately calm, appears
Swelled with new passion, and o'erflows with tears ;
The winds and trees and floods her death deplore,
Daphne, our grief ! our glory now no more ! ' '

All this is as perfectly professional as the mourn-
ing of an undertaker. Still worse, Pope material-
izes and makes too palpably objective that sympa-
thy which our grief forces upon outward nature.
Hilton, before making the echoes mourn for Lyci-
das, puts our feelings in tune, as it were, and hints
at his own imagination as the source of this emo-
tion in inanimate things, —

" But, O the heavy change now thou art gone ! "
In "Windsor Forest" we find the same thing
again : —

" Here his first lays majestic Denham sung.
There the last numbers flowed from Cowley's tongue ;
O early lost, what tears the river shed
Wlien the sad pomp along his banks was led !
His drooping swans on every note expire.
And on his willows hung each muse's lyre ! "

In the same poem he indulges the absurd conceit
that,

" Beasts urged by us, their fellow-beasts pursue.
And learn of man each other to undo ' ' ;

30 POPE

and in the succeeding verses gives some striking
instances of that artificial diction, so inappropriate
to poems descriptive of natural objects and ordi-
nary life, which brought verse-making to such a
depth of absurdity in the course of the century.

" With slaughtering guns, the unwearied fowler roves
Where frosts have whitened all the naked groves ;
Where doves in flocks the leafless trees o'ershade,
And lonely woodcocks haunt the watery glade ;
He lifts tlie tube and levels with his eye,
Straight a short thunder breaks the frozen sky :
Oft as in airy rings they skim the heath,
The clamorous lapwings feel the leaden death ;
Oft as the mounting larks their notes prepare,
They fall and leave their little lives in air."

Now one would imagine that the tube of the fowler
was a telescope instead of a gun. And think of
the larks preparing their notes like a country
choir ! Yet even here there are admirable lines, —

" Oft as in airy rings they skim the heath,"
" They fall and leave their little lives in air,"

for example.

In Pope's next poem, the " Essay on Criticism,"
the wit and poet become apparent. It is full of
clear thoughts, compactly expressed. In this poem,
written when Pope was only twenty-one, occur
some of those lines which have become proverbial :
such as

" A little learning is a dangerous thing " ;

" For fools rush in where angels fear to tread " ;

*' True wit is Nature to advantage dressed,
What oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed."

" For each ill author is as bad a friend.' '

POPE 81

In all of these we notice that terseness in which
(regard being had to his especial range of thought)
Pope has never been equalled. One cannot help
being struck also with the singular discretion which
the poem gives evidence of. I do not know where
to look for another author in whom it appeai'cd so
early, and, considering the vivacity of his mind
and the constantly besetting temptation of his %vit,
it is still more wonderfid. In his boyish corre-
spondence with poor old Wycherley, one would
suppose liim to be the man and Wycherley the
youth. Pope's understanding was no less vigorous
(when not the dupe of his nerves) than his fancy
was lightsome and sprightly.

I come now to what in itself would be enough to
have immortalized him as a poet, the " Rape of the
Lock," in which, indeed, he appears more purely
as poet than in any other of his productions. Else-
where he has shown more force, more wit, more
reach of thought, but nowhere such a truly artistic
combination of elegance and fancy. His genius
has here found its true direction, and the very
same artificiality, which in his pastorals was un-
pleasing, heightens the effect, and adds to the gen-
eral keeping. As truly as Shakespeare is the poet
of man, as God made him, dealing wdth great pas-
sions and innate motives, so tinily is Pope the poet
of society, the delineator of manners, the exposer
of those motives which may be called acquired,
whose spring is in institutions and habits of purely
worldly origin.

The " Rape of the Lock " was written in Pope's

32 POPE

twenty - fourtli year, and the machinery of the
Sylphs was added at the suggestion of Dr. Garth,
— a circumstance for which we can feel a more
unmixed gratitude to him than for writing the
" Dispensary." The idea was taken from that
entertaining book " The Count de Gabalis," in
which Fouque afterward found the hint for his
'• Undine " ; hut the little sprites as they apjjear
in the poem are purely the creation of Pope's
fancy.

The theory of the poem is excellent. The heroic
is out of the question in fine society. It is per-
fectly true that almost every door we pass in the
street closes upon its private tragedy, but the mo-
ment a great passion enters a man he passes at
once out of the artificial into the human. So long
as he continues artificial, the sublime is a conscious
absurdity to him. The mock-heroic then is the
only way in which the petty actions and sufferings
of the fine world can be epically treated, and the
contrast continually suggested with subjects of
larger scope and more dignified treatment, makes
no small part of the j^leasure and sharpens the
point of the wut. The invocation is admirable : —

"Say, what strange motive, Goddess, could compel,
A well-bred lord to assault a gentle belle ?
O say what stranger cause, yet unexplored,
Could make a gentle belle reject a lord ? "

The kejTiote of the poem is here struck, and we
are able to put ourselves in tune ^vith it. It is not
a parody of the heroic style, but only a setting it
in satirical juxtaposition with cares and events and

POPE 33

modes of thought with which it is in comical antip-
athy, and while it is not deoratled, they are shown
in their triviality. The "clouded cane," as com-
pared with the Homeric spear, indicates the differ-
ence of scale, the lower plane of emotions and pas-
sions. The opening of the action, too, is equally
good : —

"Sol through white curtains shot a timorous ray,
And oped those eyes that must eclipse the day,
Now lapdogs give tliemselves the rousing shake.
And sleepless lovers just at twelve awake ;
Thrice rung the bell, the slipper knocked the ground,
And the pressed watch returned a silver sound."'

The mythology of the Sylphs is full of the most
fanciful wit; indeed, wit infused with fancy is
Pope's peculiar merit. The Sylph is addressing
Belinda : —

" Know, then, unnumbered spirits round thee fly,
The light militia of the lower sky ;
These, though unseen, are ever on the wing.
Hang o'er the box and hover round the ring.
As now your own our beings were of old.
And once enclosed in woman's beauteous mould ;
Think not, when woman's transient breath is fled.
That all her vanities at once are dead ;
Succeeding vanities she still regards,
And, though she plays no more, o'erlooks the cards.
For when the fair in all their pride expire.
To their first elements their souls retire ;
The sprites of fiery termagants in flame
Mount up and take a salamander's name ;
Soft yielding nymplis to water glide away
And sip, with nymphs, their elemental tea ;
The graver prude sinks downward to a g'nome.
In search of mischief still on earth to roam ;
The light coquettes in sylphs aloft repair
And sport and flutter in the fields of air."

84 POPE

And the contrivance by which Belinda is awakened
is also perfectly in keeping with all the rest of the
machinery : —

" He said : when Shock, who thought she slept too long,
Leaped up and waked his mistress with liis tongue ;
'T was then, Belinda, if report say true,
Thy eyes first opened on a billet-doux.''''

Throughout this poem the satiric wit of Pope peeps
out in the pleasantest little smiling ways, as where,
in describing the toilet-table, he says : —

" Here files of pins extend their shining rows.
Puffs, powders, patches. Bibles, billet-doux.''''

Or when, after the fatal lock has been severed, —

" Then flashed the living lightning from her eyes,
And screams of liorror rend the affrighted skies.
Not louder shrieks to pitying Heaven are cast
VVhen husbands or when lapdogs breathe their last ;
Or when rich china-vessels, fallen from liigh,
In glittering dust and painted fragments lie ! "

And so, when the conflict begins : —

" Now Jove suspends his golden scales in air ;
Weighs the men's wits against the ladies' hair ;
The doubtful beam long nods from side to side ;
At length the wits mount up, the hairs subside."

But more than the wit and fancy, I think, the per-
fect keeping of the poem deserves admiration. Ex-
cept a touch of grossness, here and there, there is
the most pleasing harmony in all the conceptions
and images. The punishments which he assigns to
the syl2)hs who neglect their duty are charmingly
appropriate and ingenious : —

" Whatever spirit, careless of his charge,
His post neglects, or leaves the fair at large,

POPE 86

Shall feel sharp vengeance soon o'ertake his sins;
Be stopped in vials or transfixed with pins,
Or plunged in lakes of bitter washes lie,
Or wedged whole ages in a bodkin's eye ;
Gums and pomatums shall his flight restrain,
^Vliile clogged he beats his silver wings in vain ;
Or alum styptics with contracting power,
Shrink his thin essence like a riveUed flower ;
Or as Ixion fixed the wretch shall feel
Tlie giddy motion of the whirling wheel.
In fumes of burning chocolate shall glow.
And tremble at the sea that froths below ! "

The speech of Thalestris, too, with its droll cli'
max, is equally good : —

" Methinks already I your tears survey,
Already hear the horrid things they say.
Already see you a degraded toast.
And all your honor in a whisper lost !
How shall I then your helpless fame defend ?
'T will then be infamy to seem your friend!
And shall this prize, the inestimable prize.
Exposed through crystal to the gazing eyes,
And heightened by the diamond's circling rays,
On that rapacious hand forever blaze ?
Sooner shall grass in Hydepark Circus grow.
And wits take lodging in the sound of Bow,
Sooner let earth, air, sea, in chaos fall,
Men, monkeys, lapdogs, parrots, perish all ! "

So also Belinda's account of the morning: omens :

" 'T was this the morning omens seemed to tell ;
Thrice from my trembling hand the patch-box fell;
The tottering china shook without a wind ;
Nay, Poll sat mute, and Shock was most unkind."

The idea of the goddess of Spleen, and of her
palace, where

" The dreaded East is all the wind that blows,"

was a \Qvy happy one. In short, the whole poem

36 POPE

more truly deserves the name of a creation than
anythin<2^ Pope ever wrote. The action is confined
to a workl of his own, the supernatural agency is
wholly of his own contrivance, and nothing is al-
lowed to overstep the limitations of the subject.
It ranks by itself as one of the purest works of hu-
man fancy ; whether that fancy be strictly poetical
or not is another matter. If we compare it with
the " Midsummer-night's Dream," an uncomforta-
ble doubt is suggested. The perfection of form in
the " Rape of the Lock " is to me conclusive evi-
dence that in it the natural genius of Pope found
fuller and freer expression than in an}' other of his
poems. The others are aggregates of brilliant pas-
sages rather than harmonious wholes.

It is a droll illustration of the inconsistencies of
human nature, a more profound satire than Pope
himseK ever wrote, that his fame should chiefly
rest upon the " Essay on Man." It has been
praised and admired by men of the most opposite
beliefs, and men of no belief at all. Bishops and
free-thinkers have met here on a common ground
of sjTnpathetic approval. And, indeed, there is
no particular faith in it. It is a droll medley of
inconsistent opinions. It proves only two things
beyond a question, — that Pope was not a gi-eat
thinker ; and that wherever he found a thought,
no matter what, he could exjness it so tersely, so
clearly, and with such smoothness of versification
as to give it an everlasting currency. Hobbes's un-
wieldy Leviathan, left stranded there on the shore
of the last age, and nauseous with the stench of its

POPE 37

selfishness, — from this Pope distilled a fragrant
oil with which to fill the brilliant hunps of his })lii-
losophy, — lamps like those in the tombs of alche-
mists, that go out the moment the healthy air is let
in upon them. The only positive doctrines in the
poem are the selfishness of Hobbes set to music,
and the Pantheism of Spinoza brought down from
mysticism to commonplace. Nothing can be more
absurd than many of the dogmas taught in this
" Essay on Man." For example, Pope affirms ex-
plicith' that instinct is something better than rea-
son : —

" See him from Nature risinij slow to art,
To copy instinct then was re;ison"s part ;
Thus, then, to man the voice of nature spake ; —
Go, from the creatures thy instructions take ;
Learn from the beasts what food the thickets yield ;
Learn from the birds the physic of the field ;
The arts of building' from the bee receive ;
Learn of the mole to plough, the worm to weave ;
Learn of the little nautilus to sail,
Spread the thin oar, or catch the driving' gale."

I say nothing of the quiet way in which the gen-
eral term " nature " is substituted for God, but
how unutterably void of reasonableness is the the-
ory that Nature would have left her highest prod-
uct, man, destitute of that instinct with which she
had endowed her other creatures ! As if reason
were not the most sublimated form of instinct.
The accuracy on which Pope prided himseK, and
for which he is commended, was not accuracy of
thought so much as of expression. And he can-
not always even claim this merit, but only that of
correct rhyme, as in one of the passages I have

38 POPE

already quoted from the " Rape of the Lock " he
talks of casting shrieks to heaven, — a performance
of some difficulty, except when cast is needed to
rhyme with last.

But the supposition is that in the " Essay on
Man " Pope did not himself know what he was
writing. He was only the condenser and epigram-
iiiatizer of Bolingbroke, — a very fitting St. John
for such a gospel. Or, if he did know, we can
account for the contradictions by supposing that
he threw in some of the commonplace moralities
to conceal his real drift. Johnson asserts that
Bolingbroke in private laughed at Pope's having
been made the mouthpiece of ojiinions which he did
not hold. But this is hardly probable when we
consider the relations between them. It is giving
Pope altogether too little credit for intelligence to
suppose that he did not understand the principles
of liis intimate friend. The caution with which he
at first concealed the authorship would argue that
he had doubts as to the reception of the poem.
When it was attacked on the score of infidelity, he
gladly accepted Warburton's championship, and
assumed whatever pious interpretation he contrived
to thrust upon it. The beginning of the poem is
familiar to everybody : —

"Awake, my St. John, leave all meaner things
To low ambition and the pride of kings ;
Let us (since life can little more supply
Than just to look about us and to die)
Expatiate free o'er all this scene of man,
A mighty maze, — but not without a plan '' ;

To expatiate o'er a mighty maze is rather loose

POPE 39

writing, but the last verse, as it stood in the orig-
inal editions, was,

" A mighty maze of walks without a plan ; "

and perhaps this came nearer Pope's real opinion
than the verse he substituted for it. Warburton
is careful not to mention this variation in his notes.
The poem is evei-ywhere as remarkable for its con-
fusion of logic as it often is for ease of verse and
grace of expression. An instance of both occurs
in a passage frequently quoted : —

"Heaven from all creatures hides the book of fate ;
All but the page prescribed, their present state ;
From brutes what men, from men what spirits know,
Or who would suffer being here below ?
The lamb thy riot dooms to bleed to-day,
Had lie thy reason, would he skip and play ?
Pleased to the last, he crops the flowery food,
And licks the hand just raised to shed his blood.
O, blindness to the future kindly given
That each may fill the circle meant by heaven !
Who sees with equal eye, as God of all,
A hero perish or a sparrow fall.
Atoms or systems into ruin hurled,
And now a bubble burst, and now a world! "

Now, if " heaven from all creatures hides the book
of fate," why shovdd not the lamb " skip and play,"
if he had the reason of man ? Why, because he
would then be able to read the book of fate. But
if man himself cannot, why, then, could the lamb
with the reason of man ? For, if the lamb had
the reason of man, the book of fate would still
be hidden, so far as himself was concerned. If
the inferences we can draw from appearances are
equivalent to a knowledge of destiny, the know-

40 POPE

ing enough to take an umbrella in cloudy weather
might be called so. There is a manifest confu-
sion between what we know about ourselves and
about other people ; the whole point of the pas-
sage being that we are always mercifidly blinded
to our 010)1 future, however much reason we may
possess. There is also inaccuracy as well as inele-
gance in saying,

" Heaven,
Who sees with equal eye, as God of all,
A hero perish or a sparrow fall."

To the last verse Warburton, desirous of reconcil-
ing his author with Scripture, api)ends a note re-
ferring to Matthew x. 29 : " Are not two sparrows
sold for one farthing? and one of them shall not
fall to the ground without your Father." It would
not have been safe to have refen-ed to the thirty-
first verse : " Fear ye not, therefore, ye are of more
value than many sparrows."

To my feeling, one of the most beautiful pas-
sages in the whole poem is that familiar one : —

'* Lo, the poor Indian whose untutored mind
Sees God in clouds, or hears him in the wind.
His soul proud science never taught to stray
Far as the solar walk or milky way :
Yet simple Nature to his hope has given
Beliind the cloud-topt hill a humbler heaven ;
Some safer world in depth of woods embraced,
Some happier island in the watery waste,
Wliere slaves once more their native land behold,
No fiends torment, no Cliristians thirst for gold.
To he contents his natural desire,
He asks no angel's wing, no seraph's fire,
But thinks, admitted to that equal sky.
His faitltful dog shall bear him company."

POPE 41

But this comes in as a corollary to what went just

before : —

" Hope springs eternal in tlie human breast,
Man never is but always to be blest ;
The soul, uneasy, aiul confined from home,
Rests and expatiates in a life to come."

Then follow.s inimediately the passage about the
poor Indian, who, after all, it seems, is contented
with merely heing^ and whose soul, therefore, is
an exception to the "general rule. And what have
the " solar walk " (as he calls it) and " milky
way " to do ^^•ith the affair ? Does our hope of
heaven depend on our knowledge of astronomy ?
Or does he mean that science and faith are neces-
sarily hostile ? And, after being told that it is
the " untutored mind " of the savage which " sees
God in clouds and hears him in the wind," we are
rather surprised to find that the lesson the poet in-
tends to teach is that

" All are but parts of one stupendous whole,
Whose body Nature is, and God the soul,
That, changed through all, and yet in all the same,
Great in the earth, as in the ethereal frame,
Warms in the sim, refreshes in the breeze,
Glows in the stars, and blossoms in the trees."

So that we are no better off than the imtutored
Indian, after the poet has tutored us. Dr. War-
burton makes a rather lame attempt to ward off
the charge of Spinozism from this last passage.
He would have found it harder to show that the
acknowledgment of any divine revelation woukl
not overturn the greater part of its teachings. If
Pope intended by his poem all that the bishop

42 POPE

takes for granted in his commentary, we must
deny him what is usually claimed as his first merit,
— clearness. If he did not, we grant him clear-
ness as a writer at the expense of sincerity as a
man. Perhaps a more charitable solution of the
difficulty would be, that Pope's precision of thought
was no match for the fluency of his verse.

Lord Byron goes so far as to say, in speaking
of Pope, that he who executes the best, no matter
what his department, will rank the highest. I
think there are enough indications in these letters
of Byron's, however, that they were written rather
more against Wordsworth than for Pope. The
ride he lays down would make Voltaire a greater
poet, in some respects, than Shakespeare. Byron
cites Petrarch as an example ; yet if Petrarch had
put nothing more into his sonnets than execution,
there are plenty of Italian sonneteers who would
be his match. But, in point of fact, the depart-
ment chooses the man and not the man the depart-
ment, and it has a great deal to do with our esti-
mate of him. Is the department of Milton no
higher than that of Butler ? Byron took especial
care not to write in the style he commended. But
I think Pope has received quite as much credit in
respect even of execution as he deserves. Surely
execution is not confined to versification alone.
What can be worse than this?

*' At length Erasmus, that ^eat, injured name,
(The glory of the priesthood and the shame,)
Stemmed the wild torrent of a barbarous age,
And drove those holy vandals off the stage."

POPE 43

It would have been hard for Pope to have found a
prettier piece of confusion in any of the small
authors he laughed at than this image of a great,
injured name stemming a torrent and driving van-
dals off the stage. And in the following verses
the image is helplessly confused : —

" Kind self-conceit to some her glass applies,
Wliicb. uo one looks in with another's eyes,
But, as the flatterer or dependant paint,
Beholds himself a patriot, chief, or saint."

The use of the word "applies" is perfectly un-
English ; and it seems that people who look in this
remarkable glass see their pictures and not their
reflections. Often, also, when Pope attempts the
sublime, his epithets become curiously unpoetical,
as where he says, in the Dunciad,

*' As, one by one, at dread Medea's strain,

The sickening stars fade off the ethereal plain."

And not seldom he is satisfied with the music of
the verse without much regard to fitness of im-
agery ; in the " Essay on Man," for example : —

" Passions, like elements, though horn to fight,
Yet, mixed and softened, in his work unite ;
These 't is enough to temper and employ ;
But what composes man can man destroy ?
Suffice that Reason keep to Nature's road,
Subject, compound them, follow her and God.
Love, Hope, and Joy, fair Pleasure's smiling train,
Hate, Fear, and Grief, the family of Pain,
These, mixed with Art, and to due hounds confined.
Make and maintain the balance of the mind."

Here reason is represented as an apothecary com-
pounding pills of "pleasure's smiling train" and
the " family of pain." And in the Moral Essays,

44 POPE

" Know God and Nature only are the same ;
In man tlie judg'ment shoots at flying game,
A bird of passage, gone as soon as found,
Now in the moon, perhaps, now under ground. "

The "judgment shooting at flying game " is an odd
image enough ; but I think a bird of passage, now
in the moon and now under ground, could be found
nowhere — out of Goldsmith's Natural History, per-
haps. An epigrammatic expression will also tempt
him into saying something without basis in truth,
as where he ranks together " Macedonia's madman
and the Swede," and says that neither of them
"looked forward farther than his nose," a slang
phrase which may apply well enough to Charles
XII., but certainly not to the pupil of Aristotle,
who showed himself capable of a large political
forethought. So, too, the rhyme, if correct, is a
sufficient apology for want of propriety in phrase,
as where he makes " Socrates hleedr

But it is in his Moral Essays and parts of his
Satires that Pope deserves the j)raise which he
himself desired : —

" Happily to steer
From grave to gay, from lively to severe,
Correct with spirit, eloquent with ease,
Intent to reason, or polite to please."

Here Pope must be allowed to have established a
style of his own, in which he is without a rival.
One can open upon wit and epigram at any page.

" Behold, if Fortune or a mistress frowns,

Some plunge in business, other shave their crowns ;
To ease the soul of one oppressive weight.
This quits an empire, that embroils a state ;

POPE 45

The same adust complexion has impelled,
Charles to the couveut, Philip to the field."

Indeed, I thiuk one gets a little tired of the in-
variable this set off by the inevitable that^ and
wishes antithesis would let him have a little quiet
now and then. In the first couplet, too, the con-
ditional " frown " would have been more elegant.
But taken as detached passages, how admirably the
different characters are drawn, so admirably that
half the verses have become proverbial. This of
Addison will bear reading again : —

" Peace to all such ; hut were there one whose fires
True genius kindles and fair fame inspires ;
Blest with each talent and each art to please,
And horn to write, converse, and live with ease ;
Should such a man, too fond to rule alone.
Bear like the Turk no brother near the throne,
View him with scornful yet with jealous eyes,
And hate for arts that caused himself to rise,
Damn with faint praise, assent with civil leer.
And, without sneering, teach the rest to sneer ;
Willing to wound and yet afraid to strike.
Just hint a fault and hesitate dislike,
Alike reserved to blame or to commend,
A timorous foe and a suspicious friend ;
Dreading e'en fools, by flatterers besieged,
And so obliging that he ne'er obliged ;
Like Cato give his little Senate laws,
And sit attentive to his own applause,
While wits and templars every sentence raise,
And wonder with a foolish face of praise ; —
Who but must laugh if such a man there be ?
Who would not weep if Atticus were he ? "

With the exception of the somewhat technical im-
age in the second verse of Fame blowing the fire
of genius, which too much puts us in mind of the

46 POPE

frontispieces of the day, surely nothing better of
its kind was ever written. How applicable it was
to Addison I shall consider in another place. As
an accurate intellectual observer and describer of
personal weaknesses, Pope stands by himself in
English verse.

In his epistle on the characters of women, no one
who has ever known a noble woman, nay, I should
almost say no one who ever had a mother or sister,
will find much to please him. The climax of his
praise rather degrades than elevates.

" O, blest in temper, •whose unclouded ray
Can make to-morrow cheerful as to-day,
She who can love a sister's charms, or hear
Sighs for a daughter witli imwounded ear.
She who ne'er answei's till a husband cools,
Or, if she rules him, never shows she rules,
Charms by accepting, by submitting sways,
Yet has her himior most when she obeys ;
Lets fops or fortune fly which way they will,
Disdains all loss of tickets or codille.
Spleen, vapors, or smallpox, above them all
And mistress of herself, though china fall."

The last line is very witty and pointed, — but con-
sider what an ideal of womanly nobleness he must
have had, who praises his heroine for not being
jealous of her daughter. Addison, in commending
Pope's " Essay on Criticism," says, speaking of us
" who live in the latter ages of the world " : " We
have little else to do left us but to represent the
common sense of mankind, in more strong, more
beautiful, or more vincommon lights." I think he
has here touched exactly the point of Pope's merit,
and, in doing so, tacitly excludes him from the

POPE 47

position of poet, in the highest sense. Take two of
Jeremy Taylor's prose sentences about the Coun-
tess of Carbery, the lady in ]Milton's " Conius " :
" The religion of this excellent lady was of another
constitution : it took root downward in humility,
and brought forth fruit upward in the substantial
graces of a Christian, in charity and justice, in
chastity and modesty, in fair friendships and sweet-
ness of society. . . . And though she had the great-
est judgment, and the greatest experience of things
and persons I ever yet knew in a person of her
youth and sex and circumstances, yet, as if she
knew nothing of it, she had the meanest opinion of
herself, and like a fair taper, when she shined to all
the room, yet round about her station she had cast
a shadow and a cloud, and she shined to everybody
but herself." This is poetry, though not in verse.
The plays of the elder dramatists are not without
examples of weak and \'ile women, but they are not
without noble ones either. Take these verses of
Chapman, for example : —

" Let no man value at a little price
A virtuous woman's counsel : her winged spirit
Is feathered oftentimes with noble words
And, like her beauty, ravishing and pure ;
The weaker body, still the stronger soul.
O, what a treasure is a virtuous wife,
Discreet and loving. Xot one gift on earth
Makes a man's life so nighly bound to heaven.
She gives him double forces to endure
And to enjoy, being one with him,
Feeling his joys and griefs with equal sense :
If he fetch sighs, she draws her breath as short ;
If he lament, she melts herself in tears ;
If he be glad, she triumphs ; if he stir,

48 POPE

She moves his way, in all things his sweet ape,
Himself divinely varied without change.
All store without her leaves a man but poor,
And with her poverty is exceeding store."

Pope in the cliaracters I have read was drawing his
ideal woman, for he says at the end that she shall
be his muse. The sentiments are those of a bour-
geois and of the back parlor, more than of the poet
and the muse's bower. A man's mind is known by
the company it keeps.

Now it is very possible that the women of Pope's
time were as bad as they could be ; but if God made
poets for anything, it was to keep alive the traditions
of the pure, the holy, and the beautiful. I grant
the influence of the age, but there is a sense in
which the poet is of no age, and Beauty, driven
from every other home, will never be an outcast
and a wanderer, while there is a poet's nature left,
will never fail of the tribute at least of a song. It
seems to me that Pope had a sense of the neat rather
than of the beautiful. His nature delighted more
in detecting the blemish than in enjoying the charm.

However great his merit in expression, I think it
impossible that a true poet could have written such
a satire as the Dunciad, which is even nastier than
it is witty. It is filthy even in a filthy age, and
Swift himself could not have gone beyond some
parts of it. One's mind needs to be sprinkled with
some disinfecting fluid after reading it. I do not
remember that any other poet ever made poverty a
crime. And it is wholly without discrimination.
De Foe is set in the pillory forever ; and George

POPE 49

Wither, tlie author of that charming poem, " Fair
Virtue," chissecl among the dunces. And was it
not in this age that loose Dick Steele paid his wife
the tinest compliment ever paid to woman, when he
said " that to love her was a liberal education " ?

Even in the " Rape of the Lock," the fancy is that
of a wit rather than of a poet. It might not be just
to compare his Sylphs with the Fairies of Shake-
speare ; but contrast the kind of fancy shown in
the ]ioem with that of Drayton's Nymphidia, for
example. I will give one stanza of it, describing
the palace of the Fairy : —

" The walls of spider's legs were made,
Well mortised, and finely laid ;
(He was the master of his trade
It curiously that builded : )
The windows of the eyes of cats,
And, for the roof, instead of slats
'T is covered with the skins of hats,
With moonshine that are gilded."

In the last line the eye and fancy of a poet are rec-
ognized.

Personally we know more about Pope than about
any of our poets. He kept no secrets about himself.
If he did not let the cat out of the bag, he always
contrived to give her tail a wrench so that we might
know she was there. In spite of the savageness
of his satires, his natural disposition seems to have
been an amiable one, and his character as an author
was as purely factitious as his style. Dr. Johnson
appears to have suspected his sincerity ; but artifice
more than insincerity lay at the basis of his charac-
ter. I think that there was very little real malice

50 POPE

in him, and that his " evil was wrought from want
of thought." When Dennis was okl and poor, he
wrote a i)rologue for a phiy to be acted foi- his ben-
efit. Except Addison, he numbered among his
friends the most illustrious men of his time.

The correspondence of Pope is, on the whole, less
interesting than that of any other eminent English
poet, except that of Southey, and their letters have
the same fault of being labored compositions.
Southey's are, on the whole, the more agreeable of
the two, for they inspire one (as Pope's certainly
do not) with a sincere respect for the character of
the writer. Pope's are altogether too full of the
proclamation of his own virtues to be pleasant read-
ing. It is plain that they were mostly addressed
to the public, perhaps even to posterity. But let-
ters, however carefully drilled to be circumspect,
are sure to blab, and those of Pope leave in the
reader's mind an unpleasant feeling of circumspec-
tion, — of an attempt to look as an eminent literary
character should rather than as the man really was.
They have the unnatural constraint of a man in
full dress sitting for his portrait and endeavoring
to look his best. We never catch him, if he can
help it, at unawares. Among all Pope's corre-
spondents. Swift shows in the most dignified and,
one is tempted to say, the most amiable light. It
is creditable to the Dean that the letters which
Pope addressed to him are by far the most simple
and straightforward of any that he wrote. No
sham could encounter those terrible eyes in Dublin
without wincing. I think, on the whole, that a

^4

vpc

ropE 61

revision of judgment would substitute " discomfort-
ing consciousness of the public " for " insincerity "
in judging Pope's character by his letters. He
could not shake off the habits of the author, and
never, or almost never, in prose, acquired that
knack of seeming carelessness that makes Wal-
pole's elaborate compositions such agreeable read-
ing. Pope would seem to have kept a common-
place book of phrases proper to this or that occa^
sion ; and he transfers a compliment, a fine moral
sentiment, nay, even sometimes a burst of passion-
ate ardor, from one correspondent to another, with
the most cold-blooded impartiality. Were it not
for this curious economy of his, no one could read
his letters to Lady Woilley Montagu without a
conviction that they were written by a lover. In-
deed, I think nothing short of the spretoe injuria
formce wiU account for (though it will not excuse)
the savage vindictiveness he felt and showed to-
wards her. It may be suspected also that the bit-
terness of caste added gall to his resentment. His
enemy wore that impenetrable armor of superior
rank which rendered her indifference to his shafts
the more provoking that it was unaffected. Even
for us his satire loses its sting when we reflect that
it is not in human nature for a woman to have had
two such utterly irreconcilable characters as those
of Lady Mary before and after her quarrel witli
the poet. In any view of Pope's conduct in this
affair, there is an ill savor in his attempting to de-
grade a woman whom he had once made sacred with
his love. Spenser touches the right chord when he
says of the Rosalinde who had rejected him.

62 POPE

" Not, then, to her, that scorned thing so base,
But to myself the blame, that lookt so high ;
Yet so much grace let her vouchsafe to g^ant
To simple swain, sith her I may not love.
Yet that I may her honor paravant
And praise her worth, though far my wit above ;
Such grace shall be some guerdon of the grief
And long a£Eiction which I have endured."

In his correspondence with Aaron Hill, Pope,
pushed to the wall, appears positively mean. He
vainly endeavors to show that his personalities had
all been written in the interests of literature and
morality, and from no selfish motive. But it is
hard to believe that Theobald would have been
deemed worthy of his disgustful preeminence but
for the manifest superiority of his edition of Shake-
speare, or that Addison would have been so adroitly
disfigured unless through wounded self-love. It is
easy to conceive the resentful shame which Pope
must have felt when Addison so almost contempt-
uously disavowed all complicity in his volunteer de-
fence of Cato in a brutal assault on Dennis. Pope
had done a mean thing to pro])itiate a man whose
critical judgment he dreaded ; and the great man,
instead of thanking him, had resented his interfer-
ence as impertinent. In the whole portrait of At-
ticus one cannot help feeling that Pope's satire is
not founded on knowledge, but rather on what his
o^^^l sensitive suspicion divined of the opinions of
one whose expressed preferences in poetry implied
a condemnation of the very grounds of the satirist's
own popularity. We shall not so easily give up
the jiurest and most dignified figure of that some-

POPE 63

what vulgar generation, who ranks with Sidney and
Spenser as one of the few perfect gentknnen in our
literary annals. A man who could command the
unswerving loyalty of honest and impulsive Dick
Steele could not have been a coward or a backbiter.
The only justification alleged by Pope was of the
flimsiest kind, namely, that Addison regretted the
introduction of the sylphs in the second edition of
the " Rape of the Lock," saying that the poem was
merum sal before. Let any one ask himseK how
he likes an author's emendations of any poem to
which his ear had adapted itself in its former shape,
and he will hartUy think it needful to charge Ad-
dison with any mean motive for his conservatism
in this matter. One or two of Pope's letters are so
good as to make us regret that he did not oftener
don the dressing-gown and slippers in his corre-
spondence. One in particular, to Lord Burlington,
describing a journey on horseback to Oxford with
Lintot the bookseller, is full of a lightsome humor
worthy of Cowper, almost worthy of Gray.

Joseph Warton, in summing up at the end of his
essay on the genius and writings of Pope, says that
the largest part of his works " is of the didac-
tic, moral,, and satiric ; and, consequently, not of
the most poetic species of 'poetry ; whence it is
manifest that (jood sense and judgment were his
characteristical excellences rather than fancy and
inventlon.^^ It is plain that in any strict definition
there can be only one kind of poetry, and that what
Warton really meant to say was that Pope was not
a poet at all. This, I think, is shown by what

64 POPE

Johnson says in his " Life of Pope," though he
does not name Warton. The dispute on this point
went on with occasional lulls for more than a half-
century after Warton's death. It was renewed
with peculiar acrimony when the Rev. W. L.
Bowles diffused and confused Warton's critical
opinions in his own peculiarly helpless way in edit-
ing a new edition of Pope in 180G. Bowles en-
tirely mistook the functions of an editor, and mal-
adroitly entangled his judgment of the poetry with
his estimate of the author's character.^ Thirteen
years later, Campbell, in his " Specimens," contro-
verted Mr. Bowles's estimate of Pope's character
and position, both as man and poet. Mr. Bowles
replied in a letter to Campbell on what he called
" the invariable principles of poetry." This letter
was in turn somewliat sharply criticised by Gil-
christ in the Quarterly lieview, Mr. Bowles made
an angry and unmannerly retort, among other
things charging Gilchrist with the crime of being
a tradesman's son, whereupon the affair became
what they call on the frontier a free fight, in which
Gilchrist, Roscoe, the elder Disraeli, and Byron
took part with equal relish, though with various
fortune. The last shot, in what had grown into
a thirty years' war, between the partisans of what

1 Bowles's Sonnets, -wellnigh forgotten now, did more than his
controversial writings for the cause he advocated. Their influence
upon the coming generation was great (greater than we can well
account for) and beneficial. Coleridge tells us that he made forty
copies of them while at Christ's Hospital. Wordsworth's prefaces
first made imagination the true test of poetry, in its more mod-
em sense. But they drew little notice till later.

POPE 55

was called the Old School of poetry and those of
the New, was fired by Bowles in 1826, Bowles, in
losing his temper, lost also what little logic he had,
and though, in a vague way, aesthetically right, con-
trived always to be argumentatively wrong. Anger
made worse confusion in a brain never very clear,
and he had neither the scholarship nor the critical
faculty for a \4gorous exposition of his own thesis.
Never was wilder hitting than his, and he laid
himself open to dreadful punishment, especially
from B\Ton, whose two letters are masterpieces of
polemic prose. Bowles most happily exemplified
in his o\\Ti pamphlets what was really the turning-
point of the whole controversy (though all the
combatants more or less lost sight of it or never
saw it), namely, that without clearness and terse-
ness there could be no good writing, whether in
prose or verse ; in other words that, while precision
of phrase presupposes lucidity of thought, yet good
writing is an art as well as a gift. Byron alone
saw clearly that here was the true knot of the qiies-
tion, though, as his object was mainly mischief, he
was not careful to loosen it. The sincerity of By-
ron's admiration of Pope has been, it seems to me,
too hastily doubted. What he admired in him was
that patience in careful finish which he felt to be
wanting in himself and in most of his contempora-
ries. Pope's assailants went so far as to make
a defect of what, rightly considered, was a distin-
guished merit, though the amount of it was exag-
gerated. The weak point in the case was that his
nicety concerned itself whoUy about the phrase,

56 POPE

leaving the thought to be as faulty as it would, and
that it seldom extended beyond the couplet, often
not beyond a single verse. His serious poetry,
therefore, at its best, is a succession of loosely
strung epigrams, and no poet more often than he
makes the second line of the couplet a mere train-
bearer to the first. His more ambitious works may
be defined as careless thinking carefully versified.
Lessing was one of the first to see this, and accord-
ingly he tells us that "his great, I will not say
gi-eatest, merit lay in what we call the mechanic of
poetry." ^ Lessing, with his usual insight, paren-
thetically qualifies his statement ; for where Pope,
as in the " Rape of the Lock," found a subject ex-
actly level with his genius, he was able to make
what, taken for all in all, is the most perfect poem
in the language.

It will hardly be questioned that the man who
writes what is still piquant and rememberable, a
century and a quarter after his death, was a man of
genius. But there are two modes of uttering such
things as cleave to the memory of mankind. They
may be said or sung. I do not think that Pope's
verse anywhere sings, but it should seem that the
abiding presence of fancy in his best work forbids
his exclusion from the rank of poet. The atmos-
phere in which he habitually dwelt was an essen-
tially prosaic one, the language habitual to him was
that of conversation and society, so that he lacked
the help of that fresher dialect which seems like

^ Briefe die neueste Litteratur betreffend, 1759, ii. Brief. See
also his more elaborate criticism of the £ssay on Man {Pope ein
Metaphysiker), 1755.

POPE 67

inspiration in the elder poets. His range of asso-
ciations was of that narrow kind which is always
vulgar, whether it be found in the village or the
court. Certainly he has not the force and majesty
of Dryden in his better moods, but he has a grace,
a finesse, an art of being pungent, a sensitiveness
to imjiressions, that would incline us to rank him
with Voltaire (whom in many ways he so much
resembles), as an author with whom the gift of
writing was primary, and that of verse secondary.
No other poet that I remember ever wTote prose
which is so purely prose as his ; and yet, in any im-
partial criticism, the " Rape of the Lock " sets him
even as a poet far above many men more largely
endowed with poetic feeling and insight than he.

A great deal must be allowed to Pope for the
age in which he lived, and not a little, I think, for
the influence of Swift. In his own pro\ance he still
stands unapproachably alone. If to be the great-
est satirist of individual men, rather than of himian
nature, if to be the highest expression which the
life of the court and the ball-room has ever found
in verse, if to have added more phrases to our lan-
guage than any other but Shakespeare, if to have
charmed four generations make a man a great poet,
— then he is one. He was the chief founder of an
artificial style of Aviuting, which in his hands was
living and powerful, because he used it to express
artificial modes of thinking and an artificial state
of society. Measured by any high standard of im-
agination, he will be found wanting ; tried by any
test of wit, he is unrivalled.

MILTON 1

[1872]

If the biographies of literary men are to assume
the bulk which Mr. Masson is giving to that of
Milton, their authors should send a phial of elixir
vitce with the first volume, that a purchaser might
have some valid assurance of surviving to see the
last. Mr. Masson has already occupied thirteen
hundred and seventj'-eight pages in getting Milton
to his thirtj'-fifth year, and an interval of eleven
years stretches between the dates of the first and
second instalments of his published labors. As
Milton's literary life properly begins at twenty-one,
with the " Ode on the Nativity," and as by far the
more important part of it lies between the year at
which we are arrived and his death at the age of
sixty-six, we might seem to have the terms given us
by which to make a rough reckoning of how soon

1 The Life of John Milton : narrated in Connection with the
Political, Ecclesiastical, and Literary History of his Time. By
David Masson, M. A., LL. D., Professor of Rhetoric and English
Literature in the University of Edinburg-h. Vols, i., ii. 1638-
1043. London and New York : Macmillan & Co. IbTl. Svo.
pp. xii, (';08.

The Poetical Works of John Milton, edited, with Introduction,
Notes, and an Es.say on Milton's English, by David Masson, M. A.,
LL. D., Professor of Rhetoric and English Literature in the Uni-
versity of Edinburgh. 3 vols. Svo. Macmillan & Co. 1874.

MILTON 59

we are likely to see land. But when we recollect
the baffling- character of the winds and currents we
have already encountered, and the eddies that may
at any time slip us back to the reformation in Scot-
land or the settlement of New England ; when we
consider, moreover, that Milton's life overlapped
the grand siecle of French hterature, with its irre-
sistible temptations to digression and homily for
a man of Mr. Masson's temperament, we may be
pardoned if a sigh of doubt and discouragement
escape us. We envy the secular leisures of Methu-
selah, and are thankful that 7iis biogi-aj^hy at least
(if written in the same longeval proportion) is ir-
recoverably lost to us. What a subject would that
have been for a person of jMr. Masson's spacious
predilections ! Even if he himself can count on
patriarchal prorogations of existence, let him hang
a print of the Countess of Desmond in his study to
remind him of the ambushes which Fate lays for
the toughest of us. For myself, I have not dared
to climb a cherry-tree since I began to read his
work. Even with the promise of a speedy third
volume before me, I feel by no means sure of living
to see Mary Powell back in her husband's house ;
for it is just at this crisis that Mr. Masson, with the
diabolical art of a practised serial writer, leaves us
while he goes into an exhaustive account of the
Westminster Assembly and the political and reli-
gious notions of the Massachusetts Puritans. One
cordd not help thinking, after having got Milton
fairly through college, that he was never more mis-
taken in his life than when he wrote,

60 MILTON

"How soon hath Time, tliat subtle thief of youth,
Stolen on his wing my three-and-twentieth year ! "

Or is it Mr, Masson who has scotched Time's
wheels ?

It is plain from the Preface to the second volume
that Mr. Masson himself has an uneasy conscious-
ness that something is wrong, and that Milton
ought somehow to be more than a mere incident of
his own biography. He tells us that, " whatever
may be thought by a hasty person looking in on the
subject from the outside, no one can study the life
of Milton as it ought to be studied without being
obliged to study extensively and intimately the
contemporary history of England, and even inci-
dentally of Scotland and Ireland too. . . . Thus
on the very compulsion, or at least the suasion, of
the biography, a history grew on my hands. It was
not in human nature to confine the historical in-
quiries, once they were in progress, within the pre-
cise limits of their demonstrable bearing on the
biography, even had it been possible to determine
these limits beforehand ; and so the history as-
sumed a coordinate importance with me, was pur-
sued often for its own sake, and became, though
always with a sense of organic relation to the bio-
graphy, continuous in itself." If a " hasty person "
be one who thinks eleven years rather long to have
his button held by a biographer ere he begin his
next sentence, I take to myself the sting of Mr.
jMasson's covert sarcasm. I confess with shame a
pusillanimity that is apt to flag if a " to be contin-
ued " do not redeem its promise before the lapse of

MILTON 61

a quinquennium. I could scarce await the " Auto-
crat " himself so long. The heroic age of literature
is past, and even a duodecimo may often prove too
heavy {ploi vvv /Sporoi) for the descendants of men
to whom the folio was a pastime. But what does
Mr. Masson mean by " continuous " ? To me it
seems rather as if his somewhat rambling history
of the seventeenth century were interrupted now
and then by an unexpected apparition of Milton,
who, like Paid Pry, just pops in and hopes he does
not intrude, to tell us what he has been doing in
the mean while. The reader, immersed in Scottish
politics or the schemes of Archbishop Laud, is a lit-
tle puzzled at first, but reconciles himself on being
reminded tliat this fair-haired yomig man is the
protagonist of the drama. J^ars minima est ipsa
puella sui.

If Goethe was right in saying that every man
was a citizen of his age as well as of liis country,
there can be no doubt that in order to understand
the motives and conduct of the man we must first
make ourselves intimate with the time in which he
lived. We have therefore no fault to find with the
thoroughness of Mr. Masson's " historical inquiries."
The more thorough the better, so far as they were
essential to the satisfactory performance of his task.
But it is only such contemporary events, opinions,
or persons as were really operative on the charac-
ter of the man we are studying that are of conse-
quence, and we are to familiarize ourselves with
them, not so much for the sake of explaining as of
understanding him. The biographer, especially of

62 MILTON

a literary man, need only mark the main currents
of tendency, without being officious to trace out to
its marshy source every runlet that has cast in its
tiny pitcherfid with the rest. Much less should he
attempt an analysis of the stream and to classify
every component by itself, as if each were ever
effectual singly and not in combination. Human
motives cannot be thus chemically cross-examined,
nor do we ai-rive at any true knowledge of char-
acter by such minute subdivision of its ingredients.
/ Nothing is so essential to a biographer as an eye
that can distinguish at a glance between real events
that are the levers of thought and action, and what
Donne calls " unconcerning things, matters of fact,"
— between substantial personages, whose contact
or even neighborhood is influential, and the super-
numeraries that serve first to fill up a stage and af-
terwards the interstices of a biographical dictionaiy.

" Time hath a wallet at his back
Wherein he puts alms for Oblivion."

Let the biographer keep his fingers off that sa-
cred and merciful deposit, and not renew for us the \
bores of a former generation as if we had not
enough of our own. But if he cannot forbear that
unwise inquisitiveness, we may fairly complain when
he insists on taking us along with him in the pro-
cesses of his investigation, instead of giving us the
sifted results in their bearing on the life and char-
acter of his subject, whether for help or hindrance.
We are blinded with the dust of old papers ran-
sacked by Mr. Masson to find out that they have no
relation whatever to his hero. He had been wise

MILTON 63

if he had kept constantly in view what Milton him-
self says of those who gathered up personal tradi-
tions concerning the Apostles : " AVith less fer-
vency was studied what Saint Paul or Saint John
had written than was listened to one that could say,
' Here he taught, here he stood, this was his stature,
and thus he went habited ; and O, happy this house
that harbored him, and that cold stone whereon he
rested, this village where he wrought such a miracle.'
. . . Thus while aU their thoughts were poured
out upon circumstances and the gazing after such
men as had sat at table with the Apostles, ... by
this means they lost their time and truanted on the
fundamental grounds of saving knowledge, as was
seen shortly in their writings." Mr. Masson has so
poured out his mind upon circumstances, that his
work reminds us of Allston's picture of Elijah in
the Wilderness, where a good deal of research at
last enables us to guess at the prophet absconded
liked a conundrum in the landscape where the very
ravens could scarce have found him out, except by
di^^ne commission. The figure of Milton becomes
but a speck on the enormous canvas crowded with
the scenery through which he may by any possibility
be conjectured to have passed. I will cite a single
example of the desperate straits to which Mr. Mas-
son is reduced in order to hitch Milton on to his own
biography. He devotes the first chapter of his Sec-
ond Book to the meeting of the Long Parliament.
" Already," he tells us, " in the earlier part of the
day, the Commons had gone through the ceremony
of hearing the writ for the Parliament read, and

64 MILTON

the names of the members that had been returned
called over by Thomas Wyllys, Esq., the Clerk of
the Crown in Chancery. His deijuty, Agar, 3111-
ton s brother-in-law, may have been in attendance
on such an occasion. During the preceding month
or two, at all events. Agar and his subordinates in
the Crown Office had been unusually busy with
the issue of the writs and with the other work con-
nected with the opening of Parliament." (Vol. ii.
p. 150.) Mr. Masson's resolute " at all events " is
very amusing. Meanwhile

" The hungry sheep look up and are not fed."

Augustine Thierry has a great deal to answer
for, if to him we owe the modern fashion of writing
history picturesquely. At least his method leads
to most unhappy results when essayed by men to
whom nature has denied a sense of what the pic-
turesque really is. The historical picturesque does
not consist in truth of costume and similar accessa-
ries, but in the grouping, attitude, and expression
of the figures, caught when they are unconscious
that the artist is sketching them. The moment
they are posed for a composition, unless by a man
of genius, the life has gone out of them. In the
hands of an inferior artist, who fancies that im-
agination is something to be squeezed out of color-
tubes, the past becomes a phantasmagoria of jack-
boots, doublets, and flap-hats, the mere propert}'-
room of a deserted theatre, as if the light had been
scenical and illusory, the world an unreal thing that
vanished ^v\i\\ the foot-lights. It is the power of
catching the actors in great events at unawares that

MILTON 66

makes the glimpses given us by contemporaries so
vivid and precious. And St. Simon, one of the
gi-eat masters of the picturesque, lets us into the
secret of his art when he tells us how, in that won-
derful scene of the death of Monseigneur, he saw
" du 2)>'Cf}>i€r coup cVanl vivement porte^ tout ce
qui leiu" echappoit et tout ce qui les accableroit."
It is the gift of producing this reality that almost
makes us blush, as if we had been caught peeping
through a keyhole, and had surprised secrets to which
we had no right, — it is this only that can justify
the pictorial method of narration. Mr. Carlyle has
this power of contemporizing himself with bygone
times, he cheats us to

"Play with our fancies and believe we see";

but we find the tahleaiix vivants of the apprentices
who " deal in his conuuand without his power,"
and who compel us to work very hard indeed with
our fancies, rather wearisome. The effort of weaker
arms to shoot wath his mighty bow has filled the
air of recent literature with more than enough fruit-
less twanging.

Mr. Masson's stjde, at best cumbrous, becomes
intolerably awkward when he strives to make up '
for the want of St. Simon's jji'emier coup cVce'd by
impertinent details of what we must call the pseudo-
dramatic kind. For example, does Hall profess to
have traced Milton from the University to a " sub-
urb sink " of London ? Mr. Masson fancies he
hears Milton saying to himself, " A suburb sink I
has Hall or his son taken the ti'ouble to walk all the

66 MILTON

way down to Aldersgate here, to peep up the entry
where I live, and so have an exact notion of my
whereabouts ? There has been plagne in the neigh-
borhood certainly ; and I hope Jane Yates had my
doorstep tidy for the visit." Does Milton, answer-
ing Hall's innuendo that he was courting the graces
of a rich widow, tell us that he woidd rather
" choose a. virgin of mean fortunes honestly bred " ?
Mr. Masson forthwith breaks forth in a paroxysm
of what we suppose to be picturesqueness in this
wise : " What have we here ? Surely nothing less,
if we choose so to construe it, than a marriage ad-
vertisement ! Ho, all ye virgins of England (wid-
ows need not apply), here is an opportunity such
as seldom occurs : a bachelor, unattached ; age,
thirtj'-three years and three or four months ; height
[Milton, by the way, would have said higlitli] mid-
dle or a little less ; personal appearance unusually
handsome, ^\^th fair complexion and light auburn
hair ; circumstances independent ; tastes intellec-
tual and decidedly musical; principles Root-and-
Branch ! Was there already any young maiden in
whose bosom, had such an advertisement come in
her way, it would have raised a conscious flutter ?
If so, did she live near Oxford ? " If there is any-
thing woi'se than an unimaginative man trying to
write imaginatively, it is a heavy man when he fan- \
cies he is being facetious. He tramples out the
last spark of cheerfulness with the broad damp foot
of a hippopotamus.

I am no advocate of what is called the dignity
of history, when it means, as it too often does, that

MILTON 67

dulness has a right of sanctuary in gravity. Too
well do I recall the sorrows o£ my youth, when I
was shipped in search of knowledge on the long
Johnsonian swell of the last century, favorable to
anything but the calm digestion of historic truth.
I had even then an uneasy suspicion, which has
ripened into certainty, that thoughts were never
draped in long skirts like babies, if they were
strong enough to go alone. But surely there shoidd
be such a thing as good taste, above all a sense of
self-respect, in the historian himself, that should
not allow him to play any tricks with the dignity
of liis subject. A halo of sacredness has hitherto
invested the figure of Milton, and our image of\
him has dwelt securely in ideal remoteness from
the vidgarities of life. No diaries, no private let-
ters, remain to give the idle curiosity of after-times
the right to force itself on the hallowed seclusion
of his reserve. That a man whose famdiar epistles
were written in the language of Cicero, whose
sense of personal dignity was so great that, when
called on in self-defence to speak of himself, he
always does it with an epical stateliness of phrase,
and whose self-respect even in youth was so pro-
found that it resembles the reverence paid by other
men to a far-off and idealized character, — that he
shoidd be treated in this off-hand familiar fashion
by his biographer seems to us a kind of desecration,
a violation of good manners no less than of the
laws of biographic art. Milton is the last man in
the world to be slapped on the back with impunity.
Better the surly injustice of Johnson than such

68 MILTON

presumptuous friendship as this. Let the seven-
teenth century, at least, be kept sacred from the
insupportable foot of the interviewer !

But Mr. Masson, in his desire to be (shall I say)
idiomatic, can do something- worse than what has
been hitherto quoted. He can be even vidgar.
Discussing the motives of ISIilton's first marriage,
he says, " Did he come seeking his .£500, and did
Mrs. Powell heave a daughter at Mm?" AVe
have heard of a woman throwing herself at a
man's head, and the image is a somewhat violent
one ; but what is this to Mr. Masson's improve-
ment on it ? It has been sometimes affirmed that
the fitness of an image may be tested by trying
whether a picture could be made of it or not. Mr.
Masson has certainly offered a new and striking
subject to the historical school of British art. A
little further on, speaking of ]\Iary Powell, he says,
" We have no portrait of her, nor any account of her
appearance ; but on the usual rule of the elective
affinities of ojjposites, Milton being fair, ice toill
vote her to have been dark-haired." I need say
nothing of the good taste of this sentence, but its
absurdity is heightened by the fact that Mr. Masson
himself had left us in doubt whether the match
was one of convenience or inclination. I know
not how it may be with other readers, but for my-
self I feel inclined to resent this hail-fellow-well-
met manner with its jaunty " we vnll vote." In
some cases, Mr. Masson's indecorums in respect of
style may possibly be accounted for as attempts at
humor by one who has an imperfect notion of its

MILTON 69

ingredients. In such experiments, to judge by the
effect, the pensive element of tlie compound enters
in too hirge an excess over the hihirious. Whether
I have hit upon the true explanation, or whether
the cause lie not rather in a besetting velleity of
the picturesque and vivid, I shall leave the reader
to judge by an example or two. In the manuscript
copy of Milton's sonnet in which he claims for his
own house the immunity which the memory of Pin-
dar and Euripides secured for other walls, the title
had originally been, " On his Door when the City
expected an Assault." Milton has drawn a line
through this and substituted " When the Assault
was intended to the City." Mr. Masson fancies
" a mood of jest or semi-jest in the whole affair " ;
but we think rather that Milton's quiet assumption
of equality with two such famous poets was as se-
riously characteristic as Dante's ranking himself
sesto tra cotanto senna. Mr. Masson takes advan-
tage of the obliterated title to imagine one of Prince
Rupert's troopers entering the poet's study and
finding some of his " Anti-Episcopal pamphlets that
had been left lying about inadvertently. ' Oho ! '
the Cavalier Captain might then have said, ' Pindar
and Euripides are all very well, by G — ! I 've
been at college myself ; and when I meet a gen-
tleman and scholar, I hope I know how to treat
him ; but neither Pindar nor Euripides ever wrote
pamplilets against the Church of England, by
G— ! It won't do, Mr. Milton ! ' " This, it may be
supposed, is Mr. Masson's way of being funny and
dramatic at the same time. Good taste is shocked

70 MILTON

with this barbarous dissonance. Could not the
Muse defend her son? Again, when Charles I.,
at Edinburgh, in the autumn and winter of 1641,
fills the vacant English sees, we are told, " It was
more than an insult ; it was a sarcasm ! It was as
if the King, while giving Alexander Henderson his
hand to kiss, had winked his royal eye over that
reverend Presbyter's back ! " Now one can con-
ceive Charles II. winking when he took the Solemn
League and Covenant, but never his father under
any circiunstances. He may have been, and I be-
lieve he was, a bad king, but surely we may take
Marvell's word for it, that

" He nothing common did or mean,"

upon any of the " memorable scenes " of his life.
The image is therefore out of all imaginative keep-
ing, and vulgarizes the chief personage in a grand
liistorical tragedy, who, if not a great, was at least
a decorous actor. But Mr. Masson can do worse
than this. Speaking of a Mrs. Katherine Chidley,
who wrote in defence of the Independents against
Thomas Edwards, he says, " People wondered who
this she-Bro\vnist, Katherine Chidley, was, and did
not quite lose their interest in her when they found
that she was an oldish woman, and a member of
some hole-and-corner congregation in London. In-
deed, she put her nails into Mr. Echimrds icith
some effect^ Why did he not say at once, after
the good old fashion, that she ''set her ten com-
mandments in his face " ? In another place he
speaks of " Satan standing with his staff around

MILTON 71

him." Mr. Masson's style, a little Robertsonian
at best, naturally grows worse when forced to con-
descent! to everv-day matters. lie can no more
dismount and walk than the man in armor on a
Lord Mayor's day. " It [Aldersgate Street]
stretches away northwards a full fourth of a mile
as one continuous thoroughfare, until, crossed by
Long Lane and the Barbican, it parts with the
name of Aldersgate Street, and, under the new
names of Goswell Street and Goswell Road, com-
pletes its tendency towards the siiburbs and fields
about Islinfrton." What a noble work might not
the Directory be if composed on this scale ! The
imagination even of an alderman might well be
lost in that full quarter of a mile of continuous
thoroughfare. Mr. Masson is very gi-eat in these
passages of civic grandeur ; but he is more surpris-
ing, on the whole, where he has an image to deal
with. Speaking of Milton's " two-handed engine "
in Lycidas, he says : " May not Milton, whatever
else he meant, have meant a coming English Par-
liament with its two Houses ? Whatever he meant,
his prophecy had come true. As he sat among
his books in Aldersgate Street, the two-handed en-
gine at the door of the English Church was on the
swing. Once, t\\ace, thrice, it had swept its arcs
to gather energy ; now it was on the backmost
poise, and the blow was to descend." One cannot
help wishing that Mr. Masson woidd try his hand
on the tenth horn of the beast in Revelation, or on
the time and half a time of Daniel. There is some-
thing so consoling to a proi3het in being told that,

72 MILTON

no matter what he meant, his prophecy had come

true, and that he might mean " whatever else " he

pleased, so long as he may have meant what we

choose to think he did, reasoning backward from

the assmned fulfilment ! But perhaps there may

be detected in Mr. Masson's " swept its arcs " a

little of that prophetic hedging-in vagueness to

which he allows so generous a latitude. How if

the " two-handed engine," after all, were a broom

(or besom, to be more dignified),

" Sweeping — vehemently sweeping,
No pause admitted, no design avowed,"

like that wielded by the awful shape which Dion
the Syracusan saw ? I make the suggestion mod-
estly, though somewhat encouraged by Mr. Mas-
son's system of exegesis, wliich reminds one of the
casuists' doctrine of probables, in virtue of which
a man may be probabiliter ohligatus and ji^ohahili-
ter deohligatiis at the same time. But perhaps
the most remarkable instance of Mr. Masson's fig-
ures of speech is where we are told that the king
might have established a bona fide government
" by gi"ving public ascendency to the popular or
Parliamentary element in his Council, and indu'
cbif) the old leaven in it either to accept the new pol~
icy, or to withdrain and become inactive." There
is something consoling in the thought that yeast
should be accessible to moral suasion. It is really
too bad that bread should ever be heavy for want
of such an appeal to its moral sense as should
" induce it to accept the new policy." Of Mr.
Masson's unhappy infection with the vivid style

MILTON 73

an instance or two shall be given in justification of
what has been alleged against him in that partic-
ular, lie says of Loudon that " he was committed
to the Tower, where for more than two months he
lay, with as near a prospect as ever prisoner had
of a choj) with the executioner's axe on a scaffold
on Tower Hill." I may be over-fastidious, but the
word " chop " offends my ears with its coarseness,
or if that be too strong, has certainly the unplea-
sant effect of an emphasis unduly placed. Old
Auchinleck's saying of CromweU, that " he gart
kings ken they had a lith in their necks," is a good
examjijle of really vivid phiase, suggesting the axe
and the block, and giving one of those dreadful
hints to the imagination which are more powerfid
than any amount of detail, and whose skilful use is
the only magic employed by the masters of tndy
picturesque writing. The sentence just quoted will
serve also as an example of that tendency to sicr-
phisage which adds to the bulk of Mr. Masson's sen-
tences at the cost of their effectiveness. If he had
said simply " chop on Tower Hill " (if chop there
must be), it had been quite enough, for we all know
that the executioner's axe and the scaffold are im-
plied in it. Once more, and I have done with the
least agreeable part of my business. Mr. Masson,
after telling over again the story of Strafford with
needless length of detail, ends thus : " On Wednes-
day, the 12th of May, that proud curly head,
the casket of that brain of power, rolled on the
scaffold of Tower Hill." Why curly ? Surely it
is here a ludicrous impertinence. This careful

74 MILTON

thrusting forward of outward and unmeaning par-
ticulars, in the hope of givnng that reality to a pic-
ture which genius only has the art to do, is becom-
ing a weariness in modern descriptive writing. It
reminds one of the Mrs. Jarley expedient of dress-
ing the waxen effigies of murderers in the very
clothes they wore when they did the deed, or with
the real halter round their necks wherewith they
expiated it. It is probably very effective ^vith the
torpid sensibilities of the class who look upon wax
figures as works of art. True imaginative power
works with other material. Lady Macbeth striving
to wash away from her hands the damned spot that
is all the more there to the mind of the spectator
because it is not there at all, is a type of the meth-
ods it employs and the intensit}' of their action.

Having discharged my duty in regard to Mr.
Masson's faults of manner, which I should not have
dwelt on so long had they not greatly marred a
real enjoyment in the reading, and were they not
the ear-mark of a school which has become unhap-
pily numerous, I turn to a consideration of his work
as a whole. I think he made a mistake in his very
plan, or else was guilty of a misnomer in his title.
His book is not so much a life of Milton as a col-
lection of materials out of which a careful reader \
may sift the main facts of the poet's biogi'aphy.
His passion for minute detail is only to be equalled
by his diffuseness on points mainly if not altogether
irrelevant. He gives us a Survey of British Lit-
eratiire, occupjaug one hundred and twenty-eight
pages of his first volume, written in the main with

MILTON 15

good jwdgment, and giving the average critical
opinion upon nearly every writer, great and small,
who was in any sense a contemporary of Milton.
I have no doubt all this would be serviceable and
interesting to Mr. Masson's classes in Edinburgh
University, and they may well be congratulated on
having so competent a teacher ; but what it has to
do with Milton, unless in the case of such authors
as may be shown to have influenced his style or
turn of thought, one does not clearly see. Most
readers of a life of Milton may be presumed to
have some knowledge of the general literary history
of the time, or at any rate to have the means of
acquiring it, and Milton's manner (his style was
his own) was very little affected by any of the
English poets, with the single exception, in his ear-
lier poems, of George Wither. Mr. Masson also
has something to say about everybody, from Went-
worth to the obscurest Brownist fanatic who was
so mvxch as heard of in England during Milton's
lifetime. If this theory of a biographer's duty
should hold, our grandchildren may expect to see
" A Life of Thackeray, or who was who in England,
France, and Germany during the first Half of the
Nineteenth Century." These digressions of Mr.
Masson's from what should have been his main
topic (he always seems somehow to be " complet-
ing his tendency towards the suburbs " of his sub-
ject), give him an uneasy feeling that he must get
Milton in somehow or other at intervals, if it were
only to remind the reader that he has a certain
connection with the book. He is eager even to

76 MILTON

discuss a mere hypothesis, though an untenable
one, if it will only increase the number of pages de-
voted specially to Milton, and thus lessen the ap-
parent disproportion between the historical and
the biographical matter. Milton tells us that his
morning wont had been " to read good authors, or
cause them to be read, till the attention be weary,
or memory have his full fraught ; then with useful
and generous labors preserving the body's health
and hardiness, to render lightsome, dear, and not
lumpish obedience to the mind, to the cause of re-
ligion and our country's liberty when it shall re-
quire firm hearts in sound bodies to stand and
cover their stations rather than see the ruin of our
Protestantism and the enforcement of a slavish
life." Mr. Masson snatches at the hint : " This is
interesting," he says ; " Milton, it seems, has for
some time been practising drill ! The City Artil-
lery Ground was near. . . . Did Milton among
others make a habit of going there of mornings ?
Of this more hereafter," When Mr. Masson re-
turns to the subject he speaks of Milton's " all but
positive statement . . . that in the spring of 1G42,
or a few months before the breaking out of the
Civil War, he was in the habit of spending a part
of each day in mUitary exercise soincichere not far
from his house in Aldersgate Street.'' What he
puts by way of query on page 402 has become
downright certainty seventy-nine pages further on.
The passage from Milton's tract makes no " state-
ment " of the kind it pleases Mr. ISIasson to as-
sume. It is merely a Miltonian way of saying that

MILTON 77

he took regiilar exercise, because he believed that
moral no less than physical courage demanclecl a
sound body- And what proof does Mr. Masson
bring to confirm his theory ? Nothing more nor
less than two or three passages in " Paradise Lost,"
of which I shall quote only so much as is essential
to his argument : —

" And now
Advanced in view they stand, a horrid front
Of dreadful length and dazzling- arms, in guise
Of warriors old with ordered spear and shield,
Awaiting what command their mighty chief
Had to impose." ^

Mr. Masson assures us that " there are touches in
this description (as, for example, the ordering of
arms at the moment of halt, and without word of
command) too exact and technical to have occurred
to a mere civilian. Again, at the same review . . .

' He now prepared
To speak ; whereat their doubled ranks they bend
From wing to wing, and half enclose him round
With all his peers ; attention held them mute.' ^

To the present day this is the very process, or on©
of the processes, when a commander wishes to ad-
dress his men. They wheel inward and stand at
' attention.' " But his main argument is the phrase
'"'' ported spears," in Book Fourth, on which he has
an interesting and valuable comment. He argues
the matter thi'ough a dozen pages or more, seeking
to prove that Milton must have had some practical
experience of military drill. I confess a very grave
doubt whether " attention " and " ordered " in the
passages cited have any other than their ordinary
» Book I. 5(j2-oG7. 2 jtij. 615-618.

78 MILTON

meaning, and Milton coukl never have looked on
at the pike-exercise without learning what " ported "
meant. But, be this as it may, I will venture to
assert that there was not a boy in New England,
forty years ago, who did not know more of the
manual than is implied in Milton's use of these
terms. Mr. Masson's object in proving Milton to
have been a proficient in these martial exercises
is to increase our wonder at his not entering the
army. " If there was any man in England of
whom one might surely have expected that he
would be in arms among the Parliamentarians,"
he says, " that man was Milton." Milton may
have had many an impulse to turn soldier, as all
men must in such times, but I do not believe that
he ever seriously intended it. Nor is it any matter
of reproach that he did not. It is plain, from his
works, that he believed himself very early set apart
and consecrated for tasks of a very diiferent kind,
for services demanding as much self-sacrifice and
of more enduring result. I have no manner of
doubt that he, like Dante, believed himself divanely^
inspired with what he had to utter, and, if so, why
not also divinely guided in what he should do or
leave undone? Milton wielded in the cause he
loved a weapon far more effective than a sword.

It is a necessary result of Mr. Masson's method,
that a great deal of space is devoted to what might
have befallen his hero and what he might have
seen. This leaves a broad margin indeed for the
insertion of purely hypothetical incidents. Nay, so
desperately addicted is he to what he deems the

MILTON 79

vivid stj'le of winting, that he even goes out of his
way to imagine what might have happened to any-
body living at the same time with Milton. Having
told us fairly enough how Shakespeare, on his last
visit to London, perhaps saw Milton " a fair child
of six playing at his father's door," he must needs
conjure up an imaginary supper at the Mermaid.
"Ah! what an evening . . . was that; and how
Ben and Shakespeare he-tongued each other, while
the others listened and wondered ; and how, when
the company dispersed, the sleeping street heard
their departing footsteps, and the stars shone down
on the old roofs." Certainly, if we may believe
the old song, the stars " had nothing else to do,"
though their chance of shining: in the middle of a
London November may perhaps be reckoned very
doubtfid. An author should consider how largely i
the art of wiiting consists in knowing what to leave
in the inkstand.

Mr. Masson's volumes contain a great deal of
very valuable matter, whatever one may think of
its bearing upon the life of Milton. The chapters
devoted to Scottish affairs are particidarly interest-
ing to a student of the Great Kebellion, its causes
and concomitants. His analyses of the two armies,
of the Parliament, and the Westminster Assembly,
are sensible additions to our knowledge. A too
painful thoroughness, indeed, is the criticism we
should make on his work as a biography. Even
as a history, the reader might complain that it
confuses by the multiplicity of its details, wliile it
wearies by want of continuity. Mr. Masson lacks

80 MILTON

the skill of an accomplished story-teller. A fact
is to him a fact, never mind how unessential, and
he misses the breadth of truth in his devotion to
accuracy. The very order of his title-jjage, " The
Life of Milton, narrated in Connection with the
Political, Ecclesiastical, and Literary History of his
Time," shows, it should seem, a misconception of
the true nature of his subject. Milton's chief im-
portance, it might be fairly said his only impor-
tance, is literary. His place is fixed as the most
classical of our poets.

Neither in politics, theology, nor social ethics,
did Milton leave any distinguishable trace on the
thought of his time or in the history of opinion.
In all these lines of his activity circumstances
forced upon him the position of a controversialist
whose aims and results are by the necessity of the
case desultory and ephemeral. Hooker before him
and Ilobbes after him had a far firmer grasp of
fundamental principles than he. His studies in
these matters were perfunctory and occasional, and
his opinions were heated to the temper of the times
and shaped to the instant exigencies of the forum,
sometimes to his own convenience at the moment,
instead of being the slow result of a deliberate
judgment enlightened by intellectual and above all
historical sympathy with his subject. His interest
was rather in the occasion than the matter of the
controversy. No ajjliorisms of political science are
to be gleaned from his writings as from those of
Burke. His intense personality could never so far
dissociate itself from the question at issue as to see

MILTON 81

it in its larger scope ami more universal relations.
He was essentially a doctrinaire, ready to sacrifice
everything to what at the moment seemed the ab-
stract truth, and with no regard to historical ante-
cedents and consequences, provided those of scho-
lastic logic were carefully observed. He has no
respect for usage or tradition except when they
count in his favor, and sees no virtue in that power
of the past over the minds and conduct of men
which alone insures the continuity of national
growth and is the great safeguard of order and
progress. The life of a nation was of less impor-
tance to him than that it shovdd be conformed to
certain principles of belief and conduct. Burke
could distil political wisdom out of history because
he had a profound consciousness of the soul that
imderlies and outlives events, and of the national
character that gives them meaning and coherence.
Accordingly his words are still living and opera-
tiv^e, while Milton's pamphlets are strictly occa-
sional and no longer interesting except as they
illustrate him. In the Latin ones especially there
is an odd mixture of the pedagogue and the public
orator. His training, so far as it was thorough, so
far, indeed, as it may be called optional, was purely
poetical and artistic. A true Attic bee, he made
boot on every lip where there was a trace of truly
classic honey.

Milton, indeed, could hardly have been a match
for some of his antagonists in theological and
ecclesiastical learning. But he brought into the
contest a white heat of personal conviction that

82 MILTON

counted for imu-li. His self-consciousness, always
active, identified hiui with the cause he undertook.
" I conceived myself to be now not as mine o\vn
person, but as a member incorporate into that
truth whereof I was persuaded and whereof I had
declared myself openly to be the partaker." ^ Ac-
cordingly it does not so much seem that he is the
advocate of Puritanism, Freedom of Conscience, or
the People of England, as that all these are Ae,
and that he is speaking for himself. He was not
nice in the choice of his missiles, and too often
borrows a dirty lump from the dunghill of Luther ;
but now and then the gnarled sticks of controversy
turn to golden arrows of Phoebus in his trembling
hands, singing as they fly and carrying their mes-
sages of doom in music. Then, truly, in his prose
as in his verse, his is the large utterance of the
early gods, and there is that in him which tramples
all learning under his victorious feet. From the
first he looked upon himself as a man dedicated
and set apart. He had that sublime persuasion of
a divine mission which sometimes lifts his speech
from personal to cosmopolitan significance ; his
genius unmistakably asserts itself from time to
time, calling down fire from heaven to kindle the
sacrifice of irksome private dut}% and turning the
hearthstone of an obscure man into an altar for the
worship of mankind. Plainly enough here was a
man who had received something other than Epis-
copal ordination. Mysterious and awful powers
had laid their unimaginable hands on that fair
1 Apology for Smectymnuus.

MILTON 83

head and devoted it to a nobler service. Yet it
must be confessed that, with the single exception
of the " Areopagitiea," Milton's tracts are weari-
some reading, and going through them is like
a long sea- voyage whose monotony is more than \
compensated for the moment by a stripe of phos-
phorescence heaping before you in a drift of star-
sown snow, coiling away behind in winking disks
of silver, as if the conscious element were giving
out all the moonlight it had garnered in its loyal
depths since first it gazed upon its pallid regent.
Which, being interpreted, means that his prose is
of value because it is Milton's, because it some-
times exhibits in an inferior degree the qualities of
his verse, and not for its power of thought, of rea-
soning, or of statement. It is valuable, where it is
best, for its inspiring quality, like the fervencies of
a Hebrew prophet. The English translation of
the Bible had to a very great degree Judaized, not
the English mind, but the Puritan temper. Those
fierce enthusiasts coidd more easily find elbow-room
for their consciences in an ideal Israel than in a
practical England. It was convenient to see Ama-
lek or Philistia in the men who met them in the
field, and one unintelligible horn or other of the
Beast in their theological opponents. The spiritual
2)rovincialism of the Jewish race found something
conjrenial in the Enjylish mind. Their national
egotism quintessentialized in the prophets was es-
pecially sympathetic with the personal egotism of
Milton. It was only as an inspired and irrespon-
sible person that he could live on decent terras with

84 MILTON

his own self-confident individuality. There is an
intolerant egotism which identifies itself with om-
nipotence,^ and whose sublimity is its apology;
there is an intolerable egotism which subordinates
the sun to the watch in its own fob. Milton's was
of the former kind, and accordingly the finest pas-
sages in his prose and not the least fine in his verse
are autobiographic, and this is the more striking
that they are often unconsciously so. Those fallen
angels in utter ruin and combustion hurled, are
also cavaliers fighting against the Good Old Cause;
Philistia is the Restoration, and what Samson did,
that Milton would have done if he could.

The " Areopagitica " might seem an exception,
but that also is a plea rather than an argument,
and his interest in the question is not one of ab-
stract principle, but of personal relation to himself.
He was far more rhetorician than thinker. The
sonorous amplitude of his style was better fitted to
persuade the feelings than to convince the reason.
The only passages from his prose that may be said
to have survived are emotional, not argumentative,
or they have lived in virtue of their figurative
beauty, not their weight of thought. Milton's
power lay in dilation. Touched by him, the sim-
plest image, the most obvioiis thought,

' ' Dilated stood
Like TenerifFe or Atlas . . .
. . . nor wanted in his g^asp
AVhat seemed both spear and shield."

^ " For him I was not sent, nor yet to free

Tliat people, victor once, now vile and base,
Deservedly made vassal." (jP. i?., IV. 131-133.)

MILTON 86

But the thill stiletto of Maechiavelli is a more
effective weapon than these fantastic arms of his.
He had not the secret of compression that properly
belongs to the political thinker, on whom, as Haz-
litt said of himself, "nothing but abstract ideas
makes any impression." Almost every aphoristic
phrase that he has made current is borrowed from
some one of the classics, like his famous

"License they mean when they cry liberty,"

from Tacitus. This is no reproach to liim so far
as his true function, that of poet, is concerned. It
is his peculiar glory that literature was with him
so much an art, an end and not a means. Of his
political work he has himself told us, " I shoidd
not choose this manner of writing, wherein, know-
ing myself inferior to myself (led by the genial
power of nature to another task), I have the use,
as I may account, but of my left hand."

Mr. Masson has given an excellent analysis of
these wi-itings, selecting with great judgment the
salient passages, which have an air of blank-verse
thinly disguised as prose, like some of the cor-
rupted passages of Shakespeare. We are partic-
ularly thankfid to him for his extracts from the
pamphlets wi-itten against Milton, especially for
such as contain criticisms on his style. It is not
a little interesting to see the most stately of poets
reproached for his use of vulgarisms and low
words. We seem to get a glimpse of the schooling
of his " choiceful sense " to that nicety which could
not be content till it had made his native tongue

86 MILTON

*' search all her coffers round." One cannot help
thinking- also that his practice in prose, especially
in the long- involutions of Latin periods, helped
him to give that variety of pause and that majestic
harmony to his blank-verse which have made it so
unapproachably his own. Landor, who, like Mil-
ton, seems to have thought in Latin, has caught
somewhat more than others of the dignity of his
gait, but without his length of stride. Words-
worth, at his finest, has perhaps approached it, but
with how long an interval ! Bryant has not sel-
dom attained to its serene equanimity, but never
emulates its pomp. Keats has caught something
of its large utterance, but altogether fails of its
nervous severity of phrase. Cowper's muse (that
moved with such graceful ease in slippers) becomes
stiff when (in his translation of Homer) she buc-
kles on her feet the cothurnus of Milton. Thom-
son grows tmnid wherever he assays the grandiosity
of his model. It is instructive to get any glimpse
of the slow processes by which Milton arrived at
that classicism which sets him apart from, if not
above, aU our other poets.

In gathering up the impressions made upon us
by Mr. Masson's work as a whole, we are inclined
rather to regTct his cojjiousness for his own sake
than for ours. The several parts, though dispro-
portionate, are valuable, his research has been con-
scientious, and he has given us better means of
understanding Milton's time than we possessed be-
fore. But how is it about Milton himself ? Here
was a chance, it seems to me, for a fine bit of por-

MILTON 87

trait-painting. Tliere is hardly a more stately fig-
ure in literary history than ISIilton's, no life in some
of its aspects more tragical, except Dante's. In
both these great poets, more than in any others,
the character of the men makes part of the singu-
lar impressiveness of what they wrote and of its
vitality with after times. In them the man some-
how overtops the author. The works of both are
full of autobiographical confidences. Like Dante,
Milton was forced to become a party by himself.
He stands out in marked and solitary individuality,
apart from the great movement of the Ci\al War,
apart from the supine acquiescence of the Restora-
tion, a self-opinionated, unforgiving, and unforget-
ting man. Very much alive he certainly was in
his day. Has Mr. Masson made him alive to us
again? I fear not. At the same time, while we
cannot praise either the style or the method of Mr.
Masson's work, we cannot refuse to be grateful for
it. It is not so much a book for the ordinary
reader of biography as for the student, and will be
more likely to find its place on the library-shelf
than on the centre-table. It does not in any sense
belong to light literature, but demands all the mus-
cle of the trained and vigorous reader. "Truly,
in respect of itself, it is a good life ; but in respect
that it is Milton's life it is naught."

Mr. Masson's intimacy with the facts and dates
of Milton's career renders him peculiarly fit in
some respects to undertake an edition of the poet-
ical works. His edition, accordingly, has distin-
guished merits. The introductions to the several

88 MILTON

poems are excellent and leave scarcely anything to
be desired. The general Introduction, on the other
hand, contains a great deal that might well have
been omitted, and not a little that is positively
erroneous. Mr. Masson's discussions of Milton's
English seem often to be those of a Scotsman to
whom English is in some sort a foreign tongue.
It is almost wholly inconclusive, because confined
to the Miltonic verse, while the basis of any alto-
gether satisfactory study should surely be the Mil-
tonic prose ; nay, should include all the poetry and
prose of his own age and of that immediately pre-
ceding it. The uses to which Mr. Masson has put
the concordance to Milton's poems tempt one some-
times to class him with those whom the poet him-
self taxed with being " the mousehunts and ferrets
of an index." For example, what profits a discus-
sion of Milton's uTTtt^ Aeyo/icia, a matter in which
accident is far more influential than choice?^
What sensible addition is made to our stock of
knowledge by learning that " the word woman does
not occur in any form in Milton's poetry before
' Paradise Lost,' " and that it is " exactly so with
the vfov(\. female " ? Is it any way remarkable that
such words as Adam^ God, Heaven, Hell, Para-
dise, Sin, Satan, and Serpent should occur " very
frequently " in " Paradise Lost " ? Would it not
rather have been surprising that they should not ?
Such trifles at best come under the head of what

^ If things are to be scanned so micrologically, what weighty
inferences might not be drawn from Mr. Masson's invariably print-
ing aira| \eyofiepa .'

MILTON 89

old Warner would have called curaber-minds. It
is time to protest against this minute style of
editing and commenting great poets. Gulliver's
microscopic eye saw on the fair skins of the Brob-
dignagian maids of honor '' a mole here and there
as broad as a trencher," and we shrink from a cup
of the purest Hippocrene after the critic's solar
microscope has betrayed to us the grammatical,
syntactical, and, above all, hypothetical monsters
that sprawl in every drop of it. When a poet has
been so much edited as Milton, the temptation of
whosoever undertakes a new edition to see what is
not to be seen becomes great in propoi-tion as he
finds how little there is that has not been seen
before.

Mr. Masson is quite right in choosing to mod-
ernize the spelling of Milton, for surely the reading
of our classics shoidd be made as little difficult as
possible, and he is right also in making an excep-
tion of such abnormal forms as the poet may fairly
be supposed to have chosen for melodic reasons.
His exhaustive discussion of the spelling of the orig-
inal editions seems, however, to be the less called-
for as he himself appears to admit that the compos-
itor, not the author, was supreme in these matters,
and that in nine hundi-ed and ninety-nine cases to
the thousand Milton had no system, but spelt
by immediate inspiration. Yet Mr. Masson fiUs
nearly four pages with an analysis of the vowel
sounds, in which, as if to demonstrate the futility
of such attempts so long as men's ears differ, he
tells us that the short a sound is the same in man

90 MILTON

and Darby ^ the short o sound in God and does.
and what he calls the long o sound in broad and
wrath. Speaking of the apostrophe, Mr. Masson
tells us that "it is sometimes inserted, not as a
possessive mark at all, but merely as a i)lural
mark : hero's for heroes^ myrtle s for myrtles, Gor-
gons and Hydra's, etc." Now, in books printed
about the time of Milton's the apostrophe was put
in almost at random, and in all the cases cited is
a misj^rint, except in the first, where it serves to in-
dicate that the pronunciation was not heroes as it
had formerly been.^ In the " possessive singular
of nouns already ending in ^," Mr. Masson tells us,
" Milton's general pi-actice is not to double the s /
thus, Nereus irrinMcd look, Glancus spell. The
necessities of metre woidd naturally constrain to
such forms. In a possessive followed by the word
sake or the woixl side, dislike to [of] the double
sibilant makes us sometimes drop the inflection. In
addition to ^Jhr righteousness' sake ' such phrases
as ''for thy name sake ' and ''for mercy sake,' are
allowed to pass ; bedside is normal and riverside
nearly so." The necessities of metre need not be
taken into account with a poet like Milton, who
never was fairly in his element till he got off the
soundings of prose and felt the long swell of his

1 "That you may tell heroes, •when you come
To banquet with your wife.''

Chapman's Odyssey. VIII. 336, 337.

In the facsimile of the sonnet to Fairfax I find

" Thy firm imshak'n vertue ever bring-s,"
which shows how much faith we need give to the apostrophe.

MILTON 91

verse under him like a steed that knows his rider.
But does the dislike of the double sibilant account
for the dropping of the s in these cases? Is it not
far rather the presence of the s already in the
sound satisfying- an ear accustomed to the English
slovenliness in the pronunciation of double conso-
nants ? It was this which led to such forms as con-
science sake and on justice side, and which beguiled
Ben Jonson and Dryden into thinking, the one
that iioise and the other that corps was a plural.^
What does Mr. Masson say to hillside, Bankside,
secfside, Cheapside, spindleside, spearside, gospel-
side (of a church), nightside, countryside, way-
side, hrooTcside, and I know not how many more ?
Is the first half of these words a possessive ? Or
is it not rather a noun impressed into the service
as an adjective? How do such words differ from
hilltop, toicnend, candlelight, rushlight, cityman,
and the like, where no double s can be made the
scapegoat? Certainly Milton would not have
avoided them for their sibilancy, he who wrote

" And airy tongues that syllable men's names
On sands and shores and desert wildernesses,"

" So in his seed all nations shall be blest,"

" And seat of Salmanasser whose success,"

^ Mr. Masson might have cited a good example of this from
Dnimmond, whom (as a Scotsman) he is fond of quoting for an
authority in English, —

"Sleep, Silence' child, sweet father of soft rest."

The survival of Horse for horses is another example. So by a
reverse process pult and shay have been vulgarly deduced from
the supposed jAutoIs pulse and chaise.

92 MILTON

verses that hiss like Medusa's head in wrath, and
who was, I think, fonder of the sound than any
other of our poets. Indeed, in compounds of the
kind we always make a distinction wholly indepen-
dent of the doubled s. Nobody would bog-gle at
moiintahiside ; no one would dream of saying on
thefathcrside or motherskJe.

Mr. Masson speaks of " the Miltonie forms varv-
quisht, marl't, looht, etc." Surely he does not mean
to imply that these are peculiar to ISIilton ? Chap-
man used them before Milton was born, and pressed \
them farther, as in nak't and i<af't for naked and
saved. He often prefers the contracted form in
his prose also, showing that the full form of the
past participle in ed was passing out of fashion,
though available in verse.^ Indeed, I venture to
affirm that there is not a single variety of spelling
or accent to be found in Milton which is without
example in his predecessors or contemporaries.
Even highth, which is thought peculiarly Miltonie,
is common (in Hakluyt, for example), and still

^ Chapman's spelling is presumably his own. At least he
looketl after his printed texts. I have two copies of his Byron's
Conspiracy, both dated 1(!0S, but one evidently printed later than
the other, for it shows corrections. The more solemn ending'in ed
•w;vs pi-obably kept alive by the reading of the Bible in chnrches.
Though now dropped by the clergy, it is essential to the right
hearing of the more metrical passages in the Old Testament,
which are finer and more scientific than anything in the language,
unless it be some parts of Samson Agonistes. I remember an old
gentleman who always used the contracted form of the partici-
ple in conversation, but always gave it back its embezzled syllable
in reading. Sir Thomas Browne seems to have preferred the
more solemn form. At any rate he has the spelling empuzzeled
in prose.

MILTON 93

often heard in New England. Mr. Masson gives
an odd reason for Milton's preference of it " as in-
dicating more correctly the formation of the word
by the addition of the suffix th to the adjective
highy Is an adjective, then, at the base of groivth,
earthy birt/i, truth, and other words of this kind?
Home Tooke made a better guess than this. If
Mr. Masson be right in supposing that a peculiar
meaning is implied in the spelling hearth (Para-
dise Lost, IX. 624), which he interprets as " collec-
tive produce," though in the only other instance
where it occurs it is neither more nor less than
birth, it should seem that Milton had hit upon
Home Tooke's etymology. But it is really solemn
trifling to lay any stress on the spelling of the
original editions, after ha\'ing admitted, as Mr.
^lasson has honestly done, that in all likelihood
Milton had nothing to do with it. And yet he
cannot refrain. On the word voutsqfe he hangs
nearly a page of dissertation on the nicety of Mil-
ton's ear. Mr. Masson thinks that Milton " must
have had a reason for it," ^ and finds that reason
in "his dislike to [of] the sound ch, or to [of] that
sound combined with s. . . . His fine ear taught
him not only to seek for musical effects and ca-
dences at large, but also to be fastidious as to syl-

^ He thinks the same of the variation strook and struck, though
they were probably pronounced alike. In Marlowe's Faustus
two consecutive sentences (in prose) begin with the words " Cursed
be he that struck." In a note on the passage Mr. Dyce tells us
that the old editions (there were three) have stroke and strooke in
the first instance, and all agree on strucke in the second. No in-
ference can be drawn from such casualties.

94 MILTON

lables, and to avoid harsh or difficult conjunctions
of consonants, except when there might be a mu-
sical reason for harshness or difftculty. In the
management of the letter s, the frequency of which
in English is one of the faults of the speech, he
will be found, I believe, most carefid and skilful.
More rarely, I think, than in Shakespeare will one
word ending in s be found followed immediately
in Milton by another word beginning with the same
letter ; or, if he does occasionally pen such a phrase
as 3foab^s sons, it will be difficult to find in him,
I believe, such a harsher example as eartJis snh-
stance, of which many writers would think nothing.
[With the index to back him Mr. Masson could
safely say this.] The same delicacy of ear is even
more apparent in his management of the sh sound.
He has it often, of course ; but it may be noted
that he rejects it in his verse when he can. He
writes Basan for Bashan, Slttim for Shittim,
Silo for Shiloh, Asdod for Ashdod. Still more,
however, does he seem to have been wary of the
compound sound ch as in church. Of his sensitive-
ness to this sound in excess there is a curious proof
in his prose pamphlet entitled ' An Apology against
a Pampldet, called A Modest Completion, etc.,'
where, having occasion to quote these lines from
one of the Satires ^ of his opponent, Bishoj:* Hall,

1 Tlie lines are not " from one of the Satires," and Milton made
them worse by misquoting and bringing love jinglingly near to
grove. Hall's verse (in his Satires) is always vigorous and often
harmonious. He long before Milton spoke of rhyme almost in
the very terms of the preface to Paradise Lost.

MILTON 96

' Teach each hollow grove to sound his love,
Wearying echo with one cliangeless word,'

he adds, ironically, ' And so he well might, and all
his auditory besides, with his teach each ! ' " Gen-
eralizations are always risky, but when extempo/
rized from a single hint they are maliciously so.
Surely it needed no great sensitiveness of ear to be
set on edge by Hall's echo of teach each. Did
Milton reject the h from Bashan and the rest be-
cause he disliked the sound of «7i, or because he
had found it already rejected by the Vulgate and
by some of the earlier translators of the Bible into
English? Oddly enough, Milton uses words be-
ginning with sh seven hundred and fifty-four times
in his poetry, not to speak of others in which the
sound occurs, as, for instance, those ending in tion.
Hall, had he lived long enough, might have retorted
on Milton his own

"Manliest, resolutesf, breast,
As the maguetick hardest iron draws,"

or his

" What moves thy inquisition ?
Know'st thou not that my rising is thy fall,
And my promotion thy destruction ? "

With the playful controversial wit of the day he
would have hinted that too much est-est is as fatal
to a blank-verse as to a bishop, and that danger
was often incurred by those who too eagerly
shunned it. Nay, he might even have found an
echo almost tallying with his own in

" To begirt the almighty throne
Beseeching or besieging,"

96 MILTON

a pun worthy of Milton's worst prose. Or he
might have twitted him with " a sr^^uent king who
sec/ti-." As for the sh sound, a poet couhl hardly
have found it ungracious to his ear who wi-ote,

" Gnashing for anguisA and despite and sAame,

or again,

" Then bursting forth
AfresA with conscious terrors vex me round
That rest or intermissi'oH none I find.
Before mine eyes in opposi<i'o« sits
Grim Death, my son.' '

And if Milton disliked the ch sound, he gave his
ears unnecessary pain by verses such as these, —

" Straight coucAes close ; then, rising, cAanges oft
His coucAant watch, as oae who cAose his ground " ;

still more by such a juxtaposition as "matchless
chief." 1

The truth is, that Milton was a harmonist rather
than a melodist. There are, no doubt, some exqui-
site melodies (like the " Sabrina Fair") among his
earlier poems, as could hardly fail to be the case

^ Mr. Masson goes so far as to conceive it possible that Milton
may have committed the vulgarism of leaving a t out of slep'st,
"for ease of sound." Yet the poet could bear 1003^31 and — one
stares and gasps at it — doaVdst. There is, by the way, a fami-
liar passage in which the ch sound predominates, not without a
touch of sA in a single couplet : —

" Can any mortal rmxhire of earth's mould
Breathe sucA divine encAanting ravisAment ? "
So

" Blotches and blains must all his flesh emboss,"
and perhaps

" I see his tents
Pitched about Sechem "
might be added.

MILTON 97

in an ago which proilucecl or trained the authors of
our best English glees, as ravishing in their instinc-
tive felicity as the songs of our dramatists, but he
also showed from the first that larger style which
was to be his peculiar distinction. The strain heard
in the " Nativity Ode," in the "' Solemn Music," and
in " Lycidas," is of a higher mood, as regards met-
rical construction, than anything that had thi'illed
the English ear before, giving no uncertain augury
of him who was to show what sonorous metal lay
silent till be touched the keys in the epical organ-
pipes of our various language, that have never
since felt the strain of such prevailing breath. It
was in the larger movements of metre that Milton
was great and original. I have spoken elsewhere of
Spenser's fondness for dilation as respects thoughts
and images. In Milton it extends to the language
also, and often to the single words of which a pe-
riod is composed. He loved phrases of towering
port, in which every member dilated stands like
Teneriffe or Atlas. In those poems and passages
that stamp him great, the verses do not dance inter-
Aveaving to soft Lydian airs, but march rather with
resounding tread and clang of mai-tial music. It is
true that he is cunning in alliterations, so scatter-
ing them that they tell in his orchestra without be-
ing obvious, but it is in the more scientific region
of open-voweled assonances which seem to proffer
rhyme and yet witlihold it (rhyme-wTaiths one
might call them), that he is an artist and a master.
He even sometimes introduces rhyme with mislead-
ing intervals between and unobviously in his blank-
verse : —

98 MILTON

" There rest, if any rest can harbour there ;
And, reassembling our afflicted powers,
Consult how we may henceforth most offend
Our enemy, our own loss how repair,
How overcome this dire calamity,
What reinforcement we may gain from hope,
If not, what resolution from despair." *

There is one almost perfect quatrain, —

" Before thy fellows, ambitious to win
From me some plume, that thy success may show
Destruction to the rest. This panse between
(Unanswered lest thou boast) to let thee know " ;

and another hardly less so, of a rhyme and an as-
sonance, —

" If once they hear that voice, their liveliest pledge
Of hope in fears and dangers, heard so oft
In worst extremes and on the perilous edge
Of battle when it raged, in all assaults."

There can be little doubt that the rhymes in
the first passage cited were intentional, and perhaps
they were so in the others ; but Milton's ear has
tolerated not a few perfectly rhyming couplets, and
others in which the assonance almost becomes
rhyme, certainly a fault in blank-verse : —

" From the Asian Kings (and Parthian among these),
From India and the Golden Chersonese " ;

*' That soon refreshed him wearied, and repaired
What hunger, if aught hunger, had impaired " ;

" And will alike be punished, whether thou
Reign or reign not, though to that gentle brow " ;

1 I think Coleridge's nice ear would have blamed the nearness
of enemy and calamity in this passage. Mr. Masson leaves out the
comma after If not, the pause of which is needful, I think, to the
sense, and certainly to keep not a little farther apart from what,
(" teach each " !)

MILTON 99

" Of pleasure, but all pleasure to destroy,
Save wliat is in destroying, other joy " ;

" Shall all be Paradise, far happier place
Than this of Eden, and far happier days " ;

" This ray long sufferance and my day of grace
They who neglect and scorn shall never taste " ;

" So far remote with diminution seen.

First in his East the glorious lamp was seen." *

These examples (and others might be adduced)
serve to show that Milton's ear was too busy about
the larger interests of his measures to be always
careful of the lesser. He was a strategist rather
than a drill-sergeant in verse, capable, beyond any
other English poet, of putting great masses through
the most complicated evolutions without clash or
confusion, but he was not curious that every foot
should be at the same angle. In reading " Para-
dise Lost " one has a feeling of vastness. You
float under an illimitable sky, brimmed with sun-
shine or hung with constellations ; the abysses of
space are about you ; you hear the cadenced surges
of an unseen ocean ; thunders mutter round the
horizon ; and if the scene change, it is with an ele-
mental movement like the shifting of mightj^ winds.
His imagination seldom condenses, like Shake-
speare's, in the kindling flash of a single epithet,
but loves better to diffuse itself. Witness his de-
scriptions, wherein he seems to circle like an eagle
bathing in the blue streams of air, controlling with
his eye broad sweeps of champaign or of sea, and
rarely fulmining in the sudden swoop of intenser

^ " First in his East," is not soothing to the ear.

100 MILTON

expression. He was fonder of the vague, perhaps
I should rather say the indefinite, where more is
meant than meets the ear, than any other of our
poets. He loved epithets (like old and fai') that
suggest great reaches, whether of space or time.
This bias shows itself already in his earlier j)oems,
as where he hears

" Theybr o/f curfew sound
Over some widewatered shore,"

or where he fancies the shores ^ and sounding seas
washing Lycidas far away ; but it reaches its cli-
max in the " Paradise Lost." He produces his
effects by dilating our imaginations with an impal-
pable hint rather than by concentrating them upon
too precise particulars. Thus in a famous compar-
ison of his, the fleet has no definite port, but plies
stemming nightly toward the pole in a \vide ocean
of conjecture. He generalizes always instead of
specifying, — the true secret of the ideal treatment
in which he is without peer, and, though every-
where grandiose, he is never turgid. Tasso begins
finely with

" Chiama gli abitator dell' ombre eterne
II rauco Guou della tartarea tromba ;
Treman le spaziose atre caverue,
E 1' aer cieco a quel rumor rimbomba,"

but soon spoils all by condescending to definite
comparisons with thunder and intestinal convid-
sions of the earth ; in other words, he is unwary
enough to give us a standard of measurement, and

^ There seems to be something wrong in this word shores. Did
Milton write shoals ?

r/i/L lC(^(my

MILTON 101

the moment you furnish Imagination with a yard-
stick she abdicates in favor of her statistical poor-
relation Commonplace. Milton, with this passage
in his memory, is too wise to hamper himself with
any statement for which he can be brought to book,
but XNTaps himself in a mist of looming indefinite- '
ness ;

" He called so loud that all the hollow deep
Of hell resounded,"

thus amplifying more nobly by abstention from his
usual method of prolonged evolution. No caverns,
however spacious, will serve his turn, because they
have limits. He could practise this self-denial when
his artistic sense found it needful, whether for vari-
ety of verse or for the greater intensity of effect to
be gained by abruptness. His more elaborate pas-
sages have the multitudinous roll of thunder, dying
away to gather a sullen force again from its own
reverberations, but he knew that the attention is
recalled and arrested by those claps that stop short
without echo and leave us listening. There are no
such vistas and avenues of verse as his. In reading
the " Paradise Lost "' one has a feeling of spacious- 1
ness such as no other poet gives. Milton's respect
for himself and for his own mind and its move-
ments rises wellnigh to veneration. He prepares
the way for his thought and spreads on the ground
before the sacred feet of his verse tapestries inwoven
with figures of mythology and romance. There is
no such unfailing dignity as his. Observe at what
a reverent distance he begins when he is about to
speak of himself, as at the beginning of the Third

102 MILTON

Book and the Seventh. His sustained strength is
especially felt in his beginnings. lie seems always
to start full-sail ; the wind and tide always serve ;
there is never any fluttering of the canvas. In this
he offers a striking contrast with Wordsworth, who
has to go through with a great deal of yo-heavc-
ohing before he gets under way. And thovigh, in
the didactic parts of " Paradise Lost," the wind
dies away sometimes, there is a long swell that will
not let us forget it, and ever and anon some emi-
nent verse lifts its long ridge above its tamer peers
heaped with stormy memories. And the poem
never becomes incolierent ; we feel all through it,
as in the symphonies of Beethoven, a great control-
ling reason in whose safe-conduct we trust impli-
citly.

Mr. Masson's discussions of Milton's English are,
it seems to me, for the most part unsatisfactory.
He occupies some ten pages, for example, with a
history of the genitival form its, which adds noth-
ing to our previous knowledge on the subject and
which has no relation to Milton except for its bear-
ing on the authorship of some verses attributed to
him against the most overwhelming internal evi-
dence to the contrary. Mr. Masson is altogether
too resolute to find traces of what he calls oddly
enough " recoUectiveness of Latin constructions "
in Milton, and scents them sometimes in what
would seem to the uninstructed reader very idio-
matic English. More than once, at least, he has
fancied them by misunderstanding the passage in
which they seem to occur. Thus, in " Paradise
Lost," XI. 520, 521,

MILTON 103

" Therefore so abject is their punishment,
Disfigoring not God's likeness but their own,"

has no analog^y with eorian deformant'mm, for the
context shows that it is iha punishment which dis-
figures. Indeed, Mr. Masson so often finds con-
structions difficidt, ellipses strange, and words
needing annotation that are common to all poetry,
nay, sometimes to all English, that his notes seem
not seldom to have been \\Titten by a foreigner.
On this passage in " Comus,'' —

" I do not think my sister so to seek
Or so unprincipled in virtue's book
And the sweet peace that virtue bosoms ever
As that the sing-le want of light and noise
(Not being in danger, as I trust she is not)
Could stir the constant mood of her calm thoughts,"

Mr. Masson tells us, that "in very strict construc-
tion, not heing would cling to loant as its substan-
tive ; but the phrase passes for the Latin ablative
absolute." So on the words forestalling nights,
" i. e. anticipating. Forestall is literally to antici-
pate the market by purchasing goods before they
are brought to the stall." In the verse

" Thou hast immanacled •while Heaven sees good,"

he explains that " while here has the sense of so
long as.'" But Mr. Masson's notes on the language
are his weakest. He is careful to tell us, for exam-
ple, " that there are instances of the use of shine as
a substantiv^e in Spenser, Ben Jonson, and other
poets." It is but another way of spelling sheen,
and if Mr. Masson never heard a shoeblack in the
street say, "■ Shall I give you a shine, sir ? " his

104 MILTON

experience has been singular. ^ His notes in gen-
eral are very good (though too long). Those on
the astronomy of Milton are particularly valuable.
I think he is sometimes a little too scornful of par-
allel passages,^ for if there is one thing more strik-
ing than another in this poet, it is that his great
and original imagination was almost wholly nour-
ished by books, perhaps I should rather say set in
motion by them. It is wonderfid how, from the
most withered and juiceless hint gathered in his
reading, his grand images rise like an exhalation ;
how from the most battered old lamp caught in
that huge drag-net with which he swept the waters

^ But his etymolo^cal notes are worse. For example, " recreant,
renouncing the faith, from the old French recroire, which again is
from the mediajval Latin recredere, to 'believe back,' or aposta-
tize." This is pure fancy. The word had no such meaning in
either language. He derives serenate from sera, and says that
parle means treaty, negotiation, though it is the same word as par-
ley, had the same meanings, and was commonly pronounced like
it, as in Marlowe's

" What, shall we parle with this Christian ? "
It certainly never meant treaty, though it may have meant negotia-
tion. When it did it implied the meeting face to face of the prin-
cipals. On the verses

" And some flowers and some bays
For thy hearse to strew the ways,"
he has a note to tell us that hearse is not to be taken " in our sense
of a carriage for the dead, but in the oldej sense of a tomb or
framework over a tomb." though the obvious meaning is "to
strew the ways for thy hearse." How could one do that for a
tomb or the framework over it ?

- A passage from Dante (Inferno, XI. 96-105), with its refer-
ence to Aristotle, would have given him the meaning of " Nature
taught art," which seems to puzzle him. A study of Dante and
of his earlier commentators would also have been of great service
in the astronomical notes.

MILTON 105

of learning, lie could conjure a tall genius to build
his palaces. Whatever he touches swells and tow-
ers. That wonderful passage in " Comus " of the
airy tongues, perhaps the most imaginative in sug-
gestion he ever wi'ote, was conjvired out of a dry
sentence in Purchas's abstract of Marco Polo. Such
examples help us to understand the poet. When I
find that Sir Thomas Browne had said before Mil-
ton, that Adam "was the loisest of all men since^'*
I am glad to find this link between the most pro-
f oimd and the most stately imagination of that age.
Such parallels sometimes give a hint also of the
historical development of our poetry, of its apostol-
ical succession, so to speak. Every one has noticed
Milton's fondness of sonorous proper names, which
have not only an acquired imaginative value by as-
sociation, and so serve to awaken our poetic sensi-
bilities, but have likewise a merely musical signi-
ficance. Tliis he probably caught from Marlowe,
traces of whom are frequent in him. There is cer-
tainly something of what afterwards came to be
called Miltonic in more than one passage of " Tam-
burlaine," a play in which gigantic force seems
struggling from the block, as in Michel Angelo's
Dawn.

Mr. Masson's remarks on the versification of
Milton are, in the main, judicious, but when he
ventures on particulars, one cannot always agree
with him. He seems to understand that our pros-
ody is accentual merely, and yet, when he comes to
what he calls variations, he talks of the " substitu-
tion of the Trochee, the Pyrrhic, or the Spondee,

106 MILTON

for the regular Iambus, or of the Anapaest, the
Dactyl, the Tribrach, etc., for the same." This is
always misleading. The shift of the accent in
what Mr. Masson calls " dissyllabic variations " is
common to all pentameter verse, and, in the other
case, most of the words cited as trisyllables either
were not so in ^Milton's day,^ or were so or not at
choice of the poet, according to their place in the
verse. There is not an elision of ]\lilton's without
precedent in the dramatists from whom he learned
to write blank-verse. Milton was a greater metrist
than any of them, except Marlowe and Shake-
speare, and he employed the elision (or the slur)
oftener than they to give a faint imdulation or re-
tardation to his verse, only because his epic form
demanded it more for variety's sake. How Milton
would have read them, is another question. He
certainly often marked them by an apostrophe in
his manuscripts. He doubtless composed accord-
ing to quantity, so far as that is possible in Eng-
lish, and as Co^vpe^ somewhat extravagantly says,
" gives almost as many proofs of it in his ' Paradise
Lost ' as there are lines in the poem." ^ But when
Mr. Masson tells us that

" Self-fed and self -consumed : if this fail,"

and

" Dwells in all Heaven charity so rare,"

are " only nine syllables," and that in

^ Almost every combination of two vowels might in those days
be a diphthong or not, at will. Milton's practice of elision was
confirmed and sometimes (perliaps) modified by his study of the
Italians, witli whose usage in this respect he closely conforms.

- Letter to Rev. W. Bagot, 4th January, 1791.

MILTON 107

" Created hugest that swim the ocean-stream,"

" either the tliirJ foot must be read as an anapcvst
or the word Jiugcxt must be pronounced as one syl-
lable, hug'st^" I think Milton would have invoked
the soul of Sir John Cheek. Of course Milton
read it

" Created hugest that swim th' ocean-stream,"

just as he wrote (if we may trust Mr. Masson's
facsimile)

" Thus sang the uncouth swain to th' oaks and rills,"

a verse in which both hiatus and elision occur pre-
cisely as in the Itjdian poets.^ " Gest that swim *'
would be rather a knotty anapaest, an insupporta^
ble foot indeed ! And why is even hugest worse
than Shakespeare's

" Young' st follower of thy drum " ?

In the same way he says of

" For we have also our evening and our mom,"

that " the metre of this line is irregular," and of
the rapidly fine

" Came flying and in mid air aloud thus cried,"

that it is " a line of unusual metre." Why more
unusual than

" As being the contrary to his liigh will " ?

What would Mr. Masson say to these three verses
from Dekkar ? —

^ So Dante : —

" Ma sapienza e am ore e virtute."
So Donne : —

" Simony and sodomy in churchmen's lives."

108 MILTON

" And knowing so much, I muse thou art so poor " ;

" I fan away the AxxsX flying in mine eyes " ;

" Flowing o'er with court news only of you and them."

All such participles (where no consonant divided
the vowels) were normally of one syllable, permis-
sibly of two.i If Mr. Masson had studied the
poets who preceded Milton as he has studied him^
he would never have said that the verse

" Not this rock only ; his omnipresence fills,"

was " peculiar as having a distinct syllable of over-
measure." He retains Milton's sj)elling of hunderd
without perceiving the metrical reason for it, that
fZ, t, p, h, &c., followed by I or r, might be either
of two or of three syllables. In Marlowe we find
it both ways in two consecutive verses : —

" A hundred [hundered] and fifty thousand horse,
Two hundred thousand foot, hrave men at arms." ^

Mr. Masson is especially puzzled by verses ending
in one or more unaccented syllables, and even ar-
gues in his Introduction that some of them might
be reckoned Alexandrines. He cites some lines of
Spenser as confirming his theoiy, forgetting that
rhyme wholly changes the conditions of the case

^ Mr. Masson is evidently not very familiar at first hand with
the versification to which Milton's youthful ear had heen trained,
but seems to have learned something from Abbott's Shakespearian
Grammar in the interval between writing his notes and his Intro-
duction. Walker's Shakespeare'' s Versiflcation would have been a
great help to him in default of original knowledge.

- Milton has a verse in Comus where the e is elided from the
word sister by its preceding a vowel : —

" Heaven keep my sister ! again, again, and near! "
This would have been impossible before a consonant.

MILTON 109

by throwing the accent (appreciably even now, but
more emphatically in Spenser's day) on the last
syllable.

" A spirit and judgment equal or superior,"

he calls " a remarkably anomalous line, consisting
of twelve or even thirteen syllables." Surely Mil-
ton's ear would never have tolerated a dissyllabic
" spirit " in such a position. The word was then
more commonly of one syllable, though it might be
two, and was accordingly spelt sprett (still surviv-
ing in sprite'), sprit, and even spirt, as Milton him-
self spells it in one of Mr. Masson's facsimiles.^
Shakespeare, in the verse

" Hath put a spirit of youth in everything,"

uses the word admirably well in a position where
it cannot have a metrical value of more than one
syllable, while it gives a dancing movement to the
verse in keeping with the sense. Our old metrists
were careful of elasticity, a quality which modern
verse has lost in proportion as our language has
stiffened into uniformity under the benumbing fin-
gers of pedants.

This discussion of the value of syllables is not so
trifling as it seems. A great deal of nonsense has
been \\'ritten about imperfect measures in Shake-
speare, and of the admirable dramatic effect pro-
duced by filling up the gaps of missing syllables
with pauses or prolongations of the voice in read-
ing. In rapid, abrupt, and passionate dialogue
this is possible, but in passages of continuously

^ So spirito and spirto in Italian, esperis and espirs in Old French.

110 MILTON

level speech it is barbarously absurd. I do not be-
lieve that any of our old dramatists has kno\vingly
left us a single imperfect verse. Seeing in what a
haphazard way and in how mutilated a form their
l)lays have mostly reached us, we should attribute
such faults (as a geologist would call them) to
anything rather than to the deliberate design of
the poets. Marlowe and Shakespeare, the two best
metrists among them, have given us a standard by
which to measure what licenses they took in versi-
fication, — the one in his translations, the other in
his poems. The unmanageable verses in Milton are
very few, and all of them occur in works printed
after his blindness had lessened the chances of su-
pervision and increased those of error. There are
only two, indeed, which seem to me whoUy indi-
gestible as they stand. These are,

" Burnt after them to the bottomless pit,"
and

" With them from bliss to the bottomless deep."

This certainly looks like a case where a word had
dropped out or had been stricken out by some
proof-reader who limited the number of syllables in
a pentameter verse by that of his finger-ends. Mr.
Masson notices only the first of these lines, and
says that to make it regular by accenting the word
bottomless on the second syllable would be " too
horrible." Certainly not, if Milton so accented it,
any more than blasphemous and twenty more which
sound oddly to us now. However that may be,
Milton could not have intended to close not only a
period, but a paragraph also, with an unmusical

MILTON 111

verse, and in the only other passage where the word
occurs it is accented as now on the first syllable :

" With hideous ruin and combustion down
To bottomless perdition, there to dwell."

As bottom is a word which, like bosom and besom,
may be monosyllabic or dissyllabic according to
circumstances, I am persuaded that the last pas-
sage quoted (and all three refer to the same event)
gives us the word wanting in the two others, and
that Milton wi-ote, or meant to write, —

" Burnt after them down to the bottomless pit,"

which leaves in the verse precisely the kind of rip-
ple that Milton liked best.^

]\Iuch of what Mr. Masson says in his Introduc-
tion of the way in which the verses of Milton
should be read is judicious enough, though some of
the examples he gives, of the " comicality " which
would ensue from compressing every verse into an
exact measure of ten syllables, are based on a sur-
prising ignorance of the laws which guided our
poets just before and during Milton's time in the
structure of their verses. Thus he seems to think
that a strict scansion would require us in the verses

"So he with difficulty and labor hard,"

and

" Carnation, purple, azure, or specked with gold,"

^ Milton, however, would not have balked at th^ bottomless any
more than Drayton at th^ rejected or Donne at tk' sea. Mr. Mas-
Bon does not seem to understand this elision, for he corrects V tk'
midst to V the midst, aud takes pains to mention it in a note. He
might better have restored the n in i\ where it is no contraction,
but merely indicates the pronunciation, as o' for uftuid on.

112 MILTON

to pronounce diffikty and purp\ Tliougli Mr.
Masson talks of " slurs and elisions," his ear would
seem somewhat inseusible to their exact nature or
office. His diffikty supposes a hiatus where none
is intended, and his va^ikvag purple of one syllable
wrecks the whole verse, the real slur in the latter
case being on azure or} When he asks whether
Milton required " these pronunciations in his verse,"
no positive answer can be given, but I very much
doubt whether he would have thought that some of
the lines Mr. Masson cites " remain perfectly good
Blank Verse even with the most leisurely natural
enunciation of the spare syllable," and I am sure
he would have stared if told that " the number of
accents " in a pentameter verse was " variable." It
may be doubted whether elisions and compressions
which would be thought in bad taste or even vul-
gar now were more abhorrent to the ears of Milton's
generation than to a cultivated Italian would be
the hearing Dante read as prose. After all, what
Mr. Masson says may be reduced to the infallible
axiom that poetry should be read as poetry.

Mr. Masson seems to be right in his main prin-
ciples, but the examples he quotes make one doubt
whether he knows what a verse is. For example,
he thinks it woidd be a " horror," if in the verse

" That invincible Samson far renowned "

we should lay the stress on the first syllable of in-
vincible. It is hard to see why this should be
worse than conventicle or remonstrance or succes-

1 Exactly analogous to tliat in treasurer when it is shortened to
two syllables.

MILTON 118

sor or Incompatihlc, (the tliree latter used by the
correct Daniel) or why Mr. Masson shoixld clap an
accent on sitrface merely because it comes at the
end of a verse, and deny it to invincible. If one
read the verse just cited with those that go with it,
he will find that the accent must come on the first
syllable of hivincible, or else the whole passage be-
comes chaos.^ Should we refuse to say ohleeged
\\\th. Pope because the fashion has changed ? From
its apparently greater freedom in skilfid hands,
blank verse gives more scope to sciolistic theorizing
and dogmatism than the rhyming pentameter coup-
let, but it is safe to say that no verse is good in the
one that would not be good in the other when han-
dled by a master like Dry den. Milton, like other
great poets, \vrote some bad verses, and it is wiser
to confess that they are so than to conjure up some
unimaginable reason why the reader should accept
them as the better for their badness. Such a bad
verse is

" Rocks, caves, lakes, yens, bogs, dens and shapes of death,"

which might be cited to illustrate Pope's

" And ten low words oft creep in one dull line."

Milton cannot certainly be taxed with any par-
tiality for low words. He rather loved them tall,
as the Prussian King loved men to be six feet
high in their stockings, and fit to go into the gren-

^ Milton himself has invisible, for we cannot suppose him guilty
of a verse like

" Shoots invisible virtue even to the deep,"
while, if read rightly, it has just one of those sweeping elisions
that he loved.

114 MILTON

adiers. He loved them as much for their music
as for their meaning, — perhaps more. His style,
therefore, when it has to deal with commoner
things, is apt to grow a little cumbrous and un-
wieldy. A Persian poet says that when the owl
would boast, he boasts of catching mice at the edge
of a hole. Shakespeare would have understood
this. Milton would have made him talk like an
eagle. His influence is not to be left out of ac-
count as partially contributing to that decline
toward poetic diction which was already beginning
ere he died. If it would not be fair to say that
he is the most artistic, he may be called in the
highest sense the most scientific of our poets. If
to Spenser younger poets have gone to be sung-to,
they have sat at the feet of Milton to be taught.
Our language has no finer poem than " Samson
Agonistes," if any so fine in the quality of austere
dignity or in the skill with which the poet's per-
sonal experience is generalized into a classic tra-
gedy.

Gentle as Milton's earlier portraits would seem
to show him, he had in him by nature, or bred
into him by fate, something of the haughty and
defiant self-assertion of Dante and Michael Angelo.
In no other English author is the man so large a
part of his works. Milton's haught}^ conception of
himself enters into all he says and does. Always
the necessity of this one man became that of the
whole human race for the moment. There were
no walls so sacred but must go to the ground when
he wanted elbow-room ; and he wanted a great

MILTON 115

deal. Did Mary Powell, the cavalier's daughter,
find the abode of a roundlioad schoolmaster iiicom-
patihle and leave it, forthwith the cry of the uni-
verse was for an easier dissolution of the marriage
covenant. If ^c is blind, it is with excess of light,
it is a divine partiality, an over-shadowing with
angels' wings. Phineus and Teiresias are admitted
among the prophets because they, too, had lost
their sight, and the blindness of Homer is of more
account than his Iliad. After writing in rhyme
till he was past fifty, he finds it unsuitable for his
epic, and it at once becomes " the invention of a
barbarous age to set off wretched matter aud lame
metre." If the structure of his mind be undra-
matic, why, then, the English drama is naught,
learned Jonson, sweetest Shakespeare, and the rest
notwithstanding, and he will compose a tragedy on
a Greek model with the blinded Samson for its
hero, and he will compose it partly in rhyme.
Plainly he belongs to the intenser kind of men
whose yesterdays are in no way responsible for
their to-morrows. And this makes him perennially
interesting even to those who hate his politics, de-
spise his Socinianism, and find his greatest poem
a bore. A new edition of his poems is always
welcome, for, as he is really great, he presents a
fresh side to each new student, and Mr. Masson,
in his three handsome volumes, has given us, with
much that is superfluous and even erroneous, much
more that is a solid and permanent acquisition to
our knowledge.

It results from the almost scornful withdrawal

116 MILTON

of Milton into the fortress of liis absolute person-
ality that no great poet is so uniformly self-con-
scious as he. We should say of Shakespeare that
he had the power of transforming himself into
everything ; of Milton, that he had that of trans-
forming everything into himself. Dante is indi-
vidual rather than self-conscious, and he, the cast-
iron man, grows pliable as a field of grain at the
breath of Beatrice, and flows away in waves of
sunshine. But Milton never let himself go for a
moment. As other poets ai-e possessed by their
theme, so is he se//^possessed, his great theme be-
ing John Milton, and his great duty that of inter-
preter between him and the world. I say it with
all respect, for he was well worthy translation, and
it is out of Hebrew that the version is made. Pope
says he makes God the Father reason " like a
school-divine." The criticism is witty, but inac-
curate. He makes Deity a mouthpiece for his
present theology, and had the poem been written
a few years later, the Almighty would have be-
come more heterodox. Since Dante, no one had
stood on these visiting terms with heaven.

Now it is precisely this audacity of self-reliance,
I suspect, which goes far toward making the sub-
lime, and which, faUing by a hair's-breadth short
thereof, makes the ridiculous. Puritanism showed
both the strength and weakness of its prophetic
nurture ; enough of the latter to be scoffed out of
England by the very men it had conquered in the
field, enough of the former to intrench itself in
three or four immortal memories. It has left an

MILTON 117

abiding mark in politics and religion, but its great
monuments are the prose of Bunyan and the verse
of Milton. It is a high inspiration to be the neigh-
bor of great events ; to have been a partaker in
them and to have seen noble purposes by their own
self-confidence become the very means of ignoble
ends, if it do not wholly depress, may kindle a
passion of regret deepening the song which dares
not tell the reason of its sorrow. The grand loneli-
ness of Milton in his latter years, while it makes
him the most impressive figure in our literary his-
tory, is reflected also in his maturer poems by a
sublime independence of human sympathy like that
with which mountains fascinate and rebuff us. But
it is idle to talk of the loneliness of one the habit-
ual companions of whose mind were the Past and
Future. I always seem to see him leaning in his
blindness a hand on the shoulder of each, sure
that the one will guard the song which the other
liad inspired.

DANTE 1

1872

On the banks of a little river so shrunken by the
suns of summer that it seems fast passing into a
tradition, but so swollen by the autumnal rains with
Italian suddenness of passion that the massy bridge
shudders under the impatient heap of waters be-
hind it, stands a city which, in its period of bloom
not so large as Boston, may weU rank next to
Athens in the liistory which teaches come V uoni
s' eterna.

Originally only a convenient spot in the valley
where the fairs of the neighboi-ing Etruscan city of
Fiesole were held, it gradually grew from a huddle
of booths to a town, and then to a city, which ab-
sorbed its ancestral neighbor and became a cradle
for the arts, the letters, the science, and the com-
merce 2 of modern Europe. For her Cimabue

^ The Shadow of Dante, being an Essay towards studying Him-
self, his World, and his PUgriraage. By Maria Fraucesca Ros-
setti.

" Se Dio te lasci, lettor prender f ratio
Di tua lezione."
Boston : Roberts Brothers. 1872. 8vo, pp. 29G.

- The Florentines should seem to have invented or re-invented
banks, book-keeping by double-entry, and bills of exchange. The
last, by endowing Value with the gift of fern-seed and enabling it to
walk invisible, turned the flank of the baronial tariff-system and

DANTE 119

wrought, who infused Byzantine formalisixi with a
suggestion of nature and feeling; for her the Pi-
sani, who divined at least, if they coidd not conjure
with it, the secret of Greek supremacy in scidp-
ture ; for her the marvellous boy Ghiberti proved
that unity of composition and grace of figure and
drapery were never beyond the reach of genius ; ^
for her Brunelleschi curved the dome which Michael
Angelo hung in air on St. Peter's ; for her Giotto
reared the bell-tower gi-aceful as an Horatian ode
in marble ; and the great triumvirate of Italian poe-
try, good sense, and cidture called her mother.
There is no modern city about which cluster so
many elevating associations, none in which the past
is so contemporary with us in unchanged buildings
and undisturbed monuments. The house of Dante
is still shown ; chUdi-en stUl receive baptism at the
font (il mio hel San Giovanni) where he was
christened before the acorn dropped that was to
grow into a keel for Columbus ; and an inscribed
stone marks the spot where he used to sit and watch

made the roads safe for the ^eat liberalizer, Commerce. This
made Money omnipresent, and prepared the way for its present
omnipotence. Fortunately it cannot usurp the third attribute of
Deity, — omniscience. But whatever the consequences, this Flo-
rentine invention was at first nothing' but admirable, securing to
brain its legitimate influence over brawn. The latter has begun
its revolt, but whether it will succeed better in its attempt to
restore mediaeval methods than the barons in maintaining them
remains to be seen.

^ Ghiberti' s designs have been criticised by a too systematic
aestheticism, as confounding the limits of sculpture and painting.
But is not the rilievo precisely the bridge by which the one art
passes over into the territory of the other ?

120 DANTE

the slow blocks swing up to complete the master-
thought of Aruolfo. lu the convent of St. Mark
hard by lived and labored Beato Angelico, the
saint of Christian art, and Fra Bartolommeo, who
taught Raphael dignity. From the same walls
Savonarola went forth to his triumplis, short-lived
almost as the crackle of his martyrdom. The plain
little chamber of Michael Angelo seems still to ex-
pect his return ; his last sketches lie upon the table,
his staff leans in the corner, and his slippers wait
before the empty chair. On one of the vine-clad
hills, just without the city walls, one's feet may
press the same stairs that Milton climbed to visit
Galileo. To an American there is something su-
premely impi'essive in this cumulative influence of
a past full of inspiration and rebuke, something
saddening in this repeated proof that moral supre-
macy is the only one that leaves monuments and
not ruins behind it. Time, who with us obliterates
the labor and often the names of yesterday, seems
here to have spared almost the prints of the care
'piante that shunned the sordid paths of worldly
honor.

Around the courtj^ard of the great Museum of
Florence stand statues of her illustrious dead, her
poets, painters, sculptors, architects, inventors, and
statesmen ; and as the traveller feels the ennobling
lift of such society, and reads the names or recog-
nizes the features familiar to him as his own thresh-
old, he is startled to find Fame as commonplace
here as Notoriety everywhere else, and that this
fifth-rate city should have the privilege thus to

DANTE 121

commemorate so many famous men her sons, vrhose
claim to preeminence the whole world would con-
cede. Amoug them is one figure before which
every scholar, every man who has been touched by
the tragedy of life, lingers with reverential pity.
The haggard cheeks, the lips clamped together in
unfaltering resolve, the scars of lifelong battle, and
the brow whose stern outline seems the troi)hy
of final victory, — this, at least, is a face that needs
no name beneath it. This is he who among literary
fames finds only two that for gro"\vth and immuta-
bility' can parallel his own. The suffrages of liigh-
est authority would now place liim second in that
company where he with proud humility took the
sixth place. ^

Dante (Durante, by contraction Dante) degli
Alighieri was born at Florence in 1265, probably
during the month of May.^ This is the date given
by Boccaccio, who is generally followed, though he
makes a blunder in saying, sedendo Urbano quarto
nella cattedra di San Pietro^ for Urban died in
October, 1264. Some, misled by an error in a few
of the early manuscript copies of the Divina Corn-
media^ woidd have him born five years earlier, in
1260. According to Arrivabene,^ Sansovino was

^Inferno, IV. 102.

- The Nouvelle Biographic Gentrale gives May 8 as his birth-
day. This is a mere assamption, for Boccaccio only says generally
May. The indication which Dante himself gives that he •was bom
•when the sun was in Gemini would give a range from about the
middle of May to about the middle of June, so that the 8th is
certainly too early.

^ Secolo di Dante, Udine edition of 1828, vol. iii. Part I. p.
678.

122 DANTE

the first to confirm Boccaccio's statement by the
authority of the poet himself, basing his argument
on the first verse of the Inferno^ —

" Nel mezzo del caramin di nostra vita" ;

the average age of man having been declared by
the Psalmist to be seventy years, and the period
of the poet's supposed vision being unequivocally
fixed at 1300. ^ Leonardo Aretino and Manetti
add their testimony to that of Boccaccio, and 1265
is now universally assumed as the true date. Vol-
taire,^ nevertheless, places the poet's birth in 1260,
and jauntily forgives Bayle (who, he says, ecrivait
a Rotterdam currente calamo j)Onr son lihraire)
for having been right, declaring that he esteems
him neither more nor less for having made a mis-
take of five years. Oddly enough, Voltaire adopts
this alleged blunder of five years on the next page,
in saying that Dante died at the age of fifty-six,
though he still more oddly omits the undisputed date
of his death (1321), which would have shown Bayle
to be right. The poet's descent is said to have
been derived from a younger son of the great
Roman family of the Frangipani, classed by the
popular rhyme with the Orsini and Colonna : —

" Colonna, Orsini, e Fran^pani,
Preudono oggi e pagano domani."

That his ancestors had been long established in
Florence is an inference from some expressions of

^ Arrivabene, however, is wrong'. Boccaccio makes precisely
the same reckoning in the first note of his Commentary (Bocc
Comento, etc., Firenze, 1844, vol. i. pp. 32, 33).

2 Diet. Phil., art. '' Dante."'

DANTE 123

the poet, and from their dwelling having been situ-
ated in the more ancient part of the city. The
most important fact of the poet's genealogy is, that
he was of mixed race, the Alighieri being of Teu-
tonic origin. Dante was born, as he himself tells
us,^ when the sun was in the constellation Gemini,
and it has been absurdly infei-red, from a passage
in the Inferno^ that his horoscope was drawn and
a great destiny predicted for him by his teacher,
Brunetto Latini. The Ottimo Comento tells us
that the Twins are the house of Mercury, who in-
duces in men the facidty of writing, science, and of
acquiring knowledge. This is worth mentioning
as characteristic of the age and of Dante himself,
with whom the influence of the stars took the place
of the old notion of destiny.^ It is supposed, from
a passage in Boccaccio's life of Dante, that Ali-
ghiero the father was still living when the poet was
nine years old. If so, he must have died soon after,
for Leonardo Aretino, who wrote with original doc-
uments before him, tells us that Dante lost his
father while yet a child. This circumstance may
have been not without influence in musciUarizing
his nature to that character of seK-reliance w^hich
shows itself so constantly and sharjily during his
after-life. His tutor was Brunetto Latini, a very
superior man (for that age), says Aretino paren-
thetically. Like Alexander Gill, he is now remem-
bered only as the schoolmaster of a great poet, and
that he did his duty well may be inferred from
Dante's speaking of him gratefully as one who by

1 Paradiso, XX !I. - Canto XV. ^ Purgatorio, XVI.

124 DANTE

times "taught him how man eternizes himself."
This, and what ViUani says of his refining the Tus-
can idiom (for so we understand his farli scorti in
hene parlare ^), are to be noted as of probable in-
fluence on the career of his pupil. Of the order of
Dante's studies nothing can be certainly affirmed.
His biographers send him to Bologna, Padua, Paris,
Naples, and even Oxford. All are doubtful, Paris
and Oxford most of all, and the dates utterly unde-
terminable. Yet all are possible, nay, perhaps
probable. Bologna and Padua we should be in-
clined to place before his exile ; Paris and Oxford,
if at all, after it. If no argument in favor of Paris
is to be drawn from his Pa'pe Satan ^ and the cor-
responding paix., paix, Sathan, in the autobiogra-
phy of Cellini, nor from the very definite allusion
to Doctor Siger,^ we may yet infer from some pas-
sages in the Commedia that his wanderings had
extended even farther ; ^ for it would not be hard
to show that his comparisons and illustrations from
outward things are almost invariably drawn from
actual eyesight. As to the nature of his studies,
there can be no doubt that he went through the
trivitnn (grammar, dialectic, rhetoric) and the
(liiadrivium (arithmetic, music, geometry, and as-
tronomy) of the then ordinary university course.

^ Though he himself preferred French, and ■wrote his Trtsor in
that langTiage for two reasons, "/' una perche noi siamo in Francia,
e r ultra perche la parlatura Jrancesca e piu dilettevole e piii comune
die tutti It ahri linguaggi." (Proemio, suljine.)

- In/erno, Canto VII. ^ Paradiso, Canto X.

* See especially Inferno, IX. 112 et seq ; XII. 120; XV. 4 et
seq. ; XXXII. 25-30.

DANTE 125

To these lie afterward added painting (or at least
drawing, — dcsignavo un angelo nopra certe tavo-
lette ^), theology, and medicine. He is said to have
been the pupil of Cimabue, and was certainly the
friend of Giotto, the designs for some of whose
frescos at Assisi and elsewhere have been wrongly
attributed to him, though we may safely believe in
his helpful comment and suggestion. To prove his
love of music, the episode of Casella were enough,
even without Boccaccio's testimony. The range of
Dante's study and acquirement would be encyclo-
pedic in any age, but at that time it was literally
possible to master the omne scihile^ and he seems
to have accomj^lished it. How lofty his theory of
science was, is plain from this passage in the Con-
vito : " He is not to be called a true lover of wis-
dom {jilosofo) who loves it for the sake of gain, as
do lawyers, physicians, and almost all churchmen
(Ji religiosi), w^ho study, not in order to know, but
to acquire riches or advancement, and who would
not persevere in study should you give them what
they desire to gain by it. . . . And it may be said
that (as true friendship between men consists in
each wholly loving the other) the true philosopher
loves every part of wisdom, and wisdom every part
of the philosopher, inasmuch as she draws all to
herself, »nd allows no one of his thoughts to wan-
der to other things." ^ The Convlto gives us a
glance into Dante's library. We find Aristotle
(whom he calls the philosopher, the master) cited

1 Vit. Xuov., p. 61, ed. Pesaro, 1829.
^ Tratt. III. cap. xi.

126 DANTE

seventy-six times ; Cicero, eighteen ; Albertus Mag-
nus, seven ; Boetliius, six ; Plato (at second-hand),
four ; Aquinas, Avicenna, Ptolemy, the Digest,
Luean, and Ovid, three each ; Virgil, Juvenal,
Statius, Seneca, and Horace, twice each ; and Al-
gazzali, Alfrogan, Augustine, Livy, Orosius, and
Homer (at second-hand), once. Of Greek he
seems to have understood little ; of Hebrew and
Arabic, perhaps more. But it was not only in the
closet and from books that Dante received his edu-
cation. He acquired, perhaps, the better part of it
in the streets of Florence, and later, in those home-
less wanderings which led him (as he says) wher-
ever the Italian tongue was spoken. His were the
only open eyes of that centur}-, and, as nothing es-
caped them, so there is nothing that was not pho-
tographed upon his sensitive brain, to be afterward
fixed forever in the Commedia. What Florence was
during his youth and manhood, with its Guelphs
and Ghibellines, its nobles and trades, its Bianchi
and Neri, its kaleidoscopic revolutions, " all parties
loving liberty and doing their best to destroy her,"
as Voltaire says, it would be beyond our province
to tell even if we could. Foreshortened as events
are when we look back on them across so many
ages, only the upheavals of party conflict catching
the eye, while the spaces of peace between»sink out
of the view of history, a whole centurv' seems like
a mere wild chaos. Yet during a couple of such
centuries the cathedrals of Florence, Pisa, and
Siena got built; Cimabue, Giotto, Arnolfo, the
Pisani, Brunelleschi, and Ghiberti gave the im-

DANTE 127

pulse to modern art, or brought it iu some of its
branches to its culminating point ; modern litera-
ture took its rise ; commerce became a science, and
the middle class came into being. It was a time
of fierce passions and sudden tragedies, of pictur-
esque transitions and contrasts. It found Dante,
shaped him by every experience that life is calla-
ble of, — rank, ease, love, study, affairs, statecraft,
hope, exile, hunger, dependence, despair, — until
he became endowed with a sense of the nothingness
of this world's goods possible only to the rich, and
a knowledge of man possible only to the poor. The
few well-ascertained facts of Dante's life may be
briefly stated. In 1274 occurred what we may
call his spiritual birth, the awakening in him of
the imaginative faculty, and of that profounder
and more intense consciousness which springs from
the recognition of beauty through the antithesis of
sex. It was in that year that he first saw Beatrice
Portinari. In 1289 he was present at the battle of
Campaldino, fighting on the side of the Guelphs
who there utterly routed the Ghibellines, and
where, he says characteristically enough, " I was
present, not a boy in arms, and where I felt much
fear, but in the end the greatest pleasure, from the
various changes of the fight." ^ In the same year
he assisted at the siege and capture of Caproua.^
In 1290 died Beatrice, married to Simone dei
Bardi, precisely when is uncertain, but before 1287,
as appears by a mention of her in her father's will,

' Letter of Dante, now lost, cited by Aretino.
2 In/erno, XXI. 94.

128 DANTE

bearing date January 15 of that year. Dante's
own marriage is assigned to various years, ranging
from 1291 to 1294 ; but the earlier date seems the
more probable, as he was the father of seven chil-
dren (the youngest, a daughter, named Beatrice)
in 1301. His wife was Gemma dei Donati, and
through her Dante, whose family, though noble,
was of the lesser nobility, became nearly connected
with Corso Donati, the head of a powerful clan of
the grandi, or greater nobles. In 1293 occurred
what is called the revolution of Gian Delia Bella,
in which the j^riors of the trades took the power
into their own hands, and made nobility a disquali-
fication for office. A noble was defined to be any
one who counted a knight among his ancestors, and
thus the descendant of Cacciaguida was excluded.

Delia Bella was exiled in 1295, but the nobles
did not regain their power. On the contrary, the
citizens, having all their own way, proceeded to
quarrel among themselves, and subdivided into the
popolani gi'ossl and popolani minuti, or greater
and lesser trades, — a distinction of gentility some-
what like that between wholesale and retail trades-
men. The grandi continuing turbulent, many of
the lesser nobility, among them Dante, drew over
to the side of the citizens, and between 1297 and
1300 there is found inscribed in the book of the
pliysicians and apothecaries, Dante fZ' AldigJiiei'o,
dcgli AldigIucri,poeta Fiorentino} Professor de
Vericour thinks it necessary to apologize for this
lapse on the part of the poet, and gravely bids us
^ Balbo, Vita di Dante, Firenie, 1853, p. IIT.

DANTE 129

take courage, nor think that Dante was ever an
apothecary.^ In 1300 we find him elected one of
the priors of the city. In order to a perfect mis-
understanding of everything connected with the
Florentine politics of this period, one has only to
study the various histories. The result is a spec-
trum on the mind's eye, which looks definite and
brilliant, but really hinders all accurate vision, as
if from too steady inspection of a Catharine-wheel
in fidl whirl. A few words, however, are necessary,
if only to make the confusion palpable. The rival
German families of "Welfs and Weiblincrens had
given their names, softened into Guelfi and Ghibel-
lini, — from which Gabriel Harvey ^ ingeniously,
but mistakenly, derives elves and goblins, — to two
parties in Northern Italy, representing respectively
the adherents of the pope and of the emperor, but
serving verj' well as rallying-points in all manner of
intercalary and subsidiary quarrels. The nobles, es-
pecially the greater ones, — })erhaps from instinct,
perhaps in part from hereditary tradition, as being
more or less Teutonic by descent, — were com-
monly Ghibellines, or Imperialists ; the bourgeoisie
were very commonly Guelphs, or supporters of the
pope, partly from natural antipathy to the nobles,
and partly, perhaps, because they believed them-
selves to be espousing the more purely Italian side.
Sometimes, however, the party relation of nobles
and burghers to each other was reversed, but the
names of Guelph and Ghibelline always substan-

^ Life and Times of Dante, London, 1858, p. 80.
^ Notes to Spenser's Shejjherd's Calendar.

130 DANTE

tially represented the same things. The family of
Dante had been Guelphic, and we have seen him
ah-eady as a young man serving two campaigns
against the other party. But no immediate ques-
tion as between pope and emperor seems then to
have been pending ; and while there is no evidence
that he was ever a mere partisan, the reverse would
be the inference from his habits and character.
Just before his assumption of the priorate, how-
ever, a new complication had arisen. A family
feud, beginning in the neighboring city of Pistoja,
between the Cancellieri Neri and Cancellieri Bian-
chi,^ had extended to Florence, where the Guelphs
took the part of the Neri and the Ghibellines of
the Bianchi.^ The city was instantly in a ferment
of street brawls, as actors in one of which some of
the Medici are incidentally named, — the fii'st ap-
pearance of that family in history. Both parties
appealed at different times to the pope, who sent
two ambassadors, first a bishop and then a cardi-
nal. Both pacificators soon flung out again in a
rage, after adding the new element of excommuni-
cation to the causes of confusion. It was in the
midst of these things that Dante became one of
the six priors (June, 1300), — an office which the
Florentines had made bimestrial in its tenure, in
order apparently to secure at least six constitutional
chances of revolution in the year. He advised

^ See the story at length in Balho, Vita di Dante, cap. x.

- Tims Foscolo. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that
at first the blacks were the extreme Guelplis, and the whites those
moderate Guelphs inclined to make terms with the Ghibellines.
The matter is obscure, and Balbo contradicts himself about it.

DAi\TE 131

that the leaders of both parties should be banished
to the frontiers, which was forthwith done ; the os-
tracism includin<2^ his relative Corso Donati among
the Neri, and his most intimate friend the poet
Guido Cavalcanti among the Bianchi. They were
all permitted to return before long (though after
Dante's term of office was over), and came accord-
ingly, bringing at least the Scriptural allowance
of " seven other " motives of mischief with them.
Affairs getting worse (1301), the Neri, with the
connivance of the pope (Boniface VIII.), entered
into an arrangement ^vith Charles of Valois, who
was preparing an expedition to Italy. Dante was
meanwhile sent on an embassy to Rome (Septem-
ber, 1301, according to Arrivabene,^ but probably
•earlier) by the Bianchi, who still retained all the
offices at Florence. It is the tradition that he said
in setting forth : " If I go, who remains ? and if I
stay, who goes ? " Whether true or not, the story
implies what was certainly true, that the counsel
and influence of Dante were of great weight with
the more moderate of both parties. On October
31, 1301, Charles took possession of Florence in
the interest of the Neri. Dante being still at
Rome (January 27, 1302), sentence of exile was
pronounced against him and others, with a hea\y
fine to be paid within two months ; if not paid, the
entire confiscation of goods, and, whether paid or
no, exile ; the charge against him being pecuniary
malversation in office. The fine not paid (as it

^ Secolo di Dante, p. 654. He •would seem to have been in
Rome during the Jubilee of 1300. See Inferno, XVIII. 28-33.

132 DANTE

could not be without admitting the justice of the
charges, which Dante scorned even to deny), in
less than two months (March 10, 1302) a second
sentence was registered, by which he with others
was condemned to be burned alive if taken within
the boundaries of the republic.^ From this time
the life of Dante becomes semi-mythical, and for
nearly every date we are reduced to the " as they
say " of Herodotus. He became now necessarily
identified with his fellow-exiles (fragments of all
parties united by common wrongs in a practical, if
not theoretic, Ghibellinism), and shared in their
attempts to reinstate themselves by force of arms.
He was one of their council of twelve, but withdrew
from it on account of ihe unwisdom of their meas-
ures. Whether he was present at their futile as-
sault on Florence (Jidy 22, 1304) is doubtful, but
probably he was not. From the Ottimo Comento^
written at least in part ^ by a contemporary as early
as 1333, we learn that Dante soon separated him-
self from his companions in misfortune with mu-
tual discontents and recriminations.^ During the
nineteen years of Dante's exile, it would be hard
to say where he was not. In certain districts of
Northern Italy there is scarce a village that has

^ That Dante was not of the grandi, or great nobles (what we
call grandees), as some of his biographers have tried to make out,
is plain from this sentence, where his name appears low on the list
and -nnth no ornamental prefix, after half a dozen domini. Bayle,
however, is equally wrong in supposing his family to have been
obscure.

- See Witte, " Quando e da chi sia coraposto V Ottimo Co-
mento." etc. (Leipsic, 1847).

8 On. Com. Par ad. XVII.

DANTE 133

not its trailition of him, its sedla, rocca, spelonca,
or torre di Dante ; and what between the patri-
otic complaisance of some biographers overwilling
to gratify as many provincial vanities as possible,
and the pettishness of others anxious only to snub
them, the confusion becomes hopeless.^ After his
banisliment we find some definite trace of him first
at Arezzo with Uguccione della Faggiuola ; then
at Siena ; then at Verona with the Scaligeri. lie
himself says : " Through almost all parts where
this language [Italian] is spoken, a wanderer, well-
nigh a beggar, I have gone, showing against my
will the wound of fortune. Truly I have been a
vessel without sail or rudder, driven to diverse
ports, estuaries, and shores by that hot blast, the
breath of grievous poverty ; and I have shown my-
self to the eyes of many who perhaps, through some
fame of me, had imagined me in quite other guise,
in whose view not only was my person debased, but
every work of mine, whether done or yet to do,
became of less account." ^ By the election of the
Emperor Henry VII. (of Luxemburg, November,

^ The loose way in -n-Lich many Italian scholars write history
is as amazing as it is perplexing-. For example : Count Balbo's
L.ife of Dante was published originally at Turin, in 1839. In a
note (lib. i. cap. x.) he expresses a doubt whether the date of
Dante's banishment should not be 1303, and inclines to think it
should be. Meanwhile, it seems never to have occurred to him
to employ some one to look at the original decree, still existing
in the archives. Stranger still, Le Monnier, reprinting the work
at Florence in 1853, within a stone's-throw of the document itself,
and with full permission from Ealbo to make corrections, leaves
the matter just where it was.

2 Convito, Tratt. I. cap. iii.

134 DANTE

1308), and the news of his proposed expedition
into Italy, the hopes of Dante were raised to the
liighest pitch. Henry entered Italy, October, 1310,
and received the iron crown of Lombardy at Milan,
on the day of Epiphany, 1311. His movements
being slow, and his policy undecided, Dante ad-
dressed him that famous letter, urging him to crush
first the " Hydra and Myrrha " Florence, as the
root of aU the evils of Italy (April IG, 1311). To
this year we must probably assign the new decree
by which the seigniory of Florence recalled a por-
tion of the exiles, excepting Dante, however, among
others, by name.^ The undertaking of Henry, af-
ter an ill-directed dawdling of two years, at last
ended in his death at Buonconvento (August 24,
1313 ; Carlyle says wrongly September) ; poi-
soned, it was said, in the sacramental bread, by a
Doniinican friar, bribed thereto by Florence.''^ The
story is doubtful, the more as Dante nowhere al-
ludes to it, as he certainly would have done had
he heard of it. According to Balbo, Dante spent
the time from August, 1313, to November, 1314,
in Pisa and Lucca, and then took refuge at Ve-
rona, with Can Grande della Scala (whom Voltaire
calls, drolly enough, le grand-can de Verone, as if
he had been a Tartar), where he remained till
1318. Foscolo with equal positiveness sends him,

^ Maechiavelli is the authority for this, and is carelessly cited
in the preface to the Udine edition of the Codex Bartolinianus
as placing it in 1312. Maechiavelli does no such thing, but
expressly implies an earlier date, perhaps 1310. (See Macch. Op.
ed. Baretti, London, 1772, vol. i. p. (50.)

^ See Carlyle's Frederic, vol. i. p. 1-17.

DANTE 135

immediately after the death of Henry, to Guido da
Polenta^ at Ravenna, and makes him join Can
Grande only after the latter became captain of the
Ghibelline league in December, 1318. In 1316
the government of Florence set forth a new decree
allowing the exiles to return on conditions of fine
and penance. Dante rejected the offer (by accept-
ing which his guilt would have been admitted), in
a letter still hot, after these five centuries, with in-
dignant scorn. " Is this then the glorious return
of Dante Alighieri to his country after nearly three
lustres of suffering and exile ? Did an innocence,
patent to all, merit this? — this, the perpetual
sweat and toil of study ? Far from a man, the
housemate of philosophy, be so rash and earthen-
hearted a humility as to allow himself to be offered
up bound like a school-boy or a criminal! Far
from a man, the preacher of justice, to pay those
who have done him wrong as for a favor ! This is
not the way of returning to my country ; but if
another can be found that shall not derogate from
the fame and honor of Dante, that I will enter on
with no lagging steps. For if by none such Flor-
ence may be entered, by me then never ! Can I
not everywhere behold the mirrors of the sun and
stars ? speculate on sweetest truths under any sky
without first giving myself up inglorious, nay, ig-

^ A mistake, for Guido did not become lord of Ravenna till
several years later. But Boccaccio also assigns K313 as the date
of Dante's ■withdrawal to that city, and his first protector may
have been one of the other Polentani to whom Guido (sumamed
Novello, or the Younger ; his grandfather having' borne the same
name) succeeded.

136 DANTE

nominious, to the populace and city of Florence ?
Noi' shall I want for bread." Dionisi puts the
date of this letter in 1315.^ He is certainly wrong,
for the decree is dated December 11, 1316, Fos-
colo places it in 1316, Troya early in 1317, and
both may be right, as the year began March 25.
Whatever the date of Dante's visit to Voltaire's
great Khan^ of Verona, or the length of his stay
with him, may have been, it is certain that he was
in Ravenna in 1320, and that, on his return thither
from an embassy to Venice (concerning which a
curious letter, forged probably by Doni, is extant),
he died on September 14, 1321 (13th, according
to others). He was buried at Ravenna under a
monument built by his friend, Guido Novello.^

^ Under tliis date (1315) a fourth condemnatio against Dante is
mentioned ybtrta vi anno 1315 de mense Octobris per D. Hainerium,
D. Zacharii de Urbeveteri. olim et tunc vicarium regium civiiatis
Florentice, etc. It is found recited in the decree under which in
1342 Jacopo di Dante redeemed a portion of his father's property,
to wit : Una possessions cum vinea et cum domibus supier ea, com-
bustis et non coinbusiis, posita in populo S. Miyiiatis de Pagnola.
In the domibus combustis we see the blackened traces of Dante's
kinsman by marriage, Corso Donati, who plundered and burnt
the houses of the exiled Bianchi, during the occupation of the city
by Charles of Valois. (See De Eomams, notes on Tiraboschi's
Life of Dante, in the Florence ed. of 1880, vol. v. p. 119.)

^ Voltaire's blunder has been made part of a serious theory by
Mons. E. Aroux, who gravely assures us that, during the Middle
Ages, Tartar was only a crj-ptonym by which heretics knew each
other, and adds : II n^y a done pas trop a s'itonner des notns bi-
zarres de Mastino et de Cane donnas a ces Delia Scala. (Dante,
htretique, r^volutionnaire, et socialiste, Paris, 1854, pp. 118-120.)

^ If no monument at all was built by Guido, as is asserted by
Balbo (Vita, i. lib. ii. cap. xvii.), whom De Vericour copies
without question, we are at a loss to account for the preservation

DANTE 137

Dante is said to have dictated the following in-
scription for it on his death-bed : —

JVRA MONAHCHI^ SvPEROS PhLEGETHONT\ LACVSQVE
LVSTRANDO CECINI VOLVEUVNT FatA QVOVSQVE
SeD QVIA pars CESSIT MELIOHIHVS HOSPITA CASTKIS

Avctoremqve svvm PETirr felicior astris
Hic CLAVDOR Dantes patriis extorris ab oris
Qvem genvit parvi Florentia mater amoris.

Of which this rude paraphrase may serve as a

translation : —

The rights of Monarchy, the Heavens, the Stream of Fire, the Pit,
In vision seen, I sang as far as to the Fates seemed fit ;
But since my soul, an alien here, hath flown to nobler wars.
And, happier now, hath gone to seek its Maker 'mid the stars,
Here am I Dante shut, exiled from the ancestral shore,
Whom Florence, the of all least-loving mother, bore.'

of the original epitaph replaced by Bernardo Bembo when he built
the new tomb, in 14So. Bembo's own inscription implies an al-
ready existing monument, and, if in disparaging terms, yet epi-
taphial Latin verses are not to be taken too literally, considering
the exigencies of that branch of literary ingenuity. The doggerel
Latin has been thought by some unworthy of Dante, as Shake-
speare's doggerel English epitaph has been thought unworthy of
him. In both cases the rudeness of the verses seems to us a proof
of authenticity. An enlightened posterity with unlimited super-
latives at command, and in an age when stone-cutting was cheap,
would have aimed at something more befitting the occasion. It
is certain, at least in Dante's case, that Bembo would never have
inserted in the very first words an allusion to the I)e Monorchia,
a book long before condemned as heretical.

^ We have translated lacusque by " the Pit," as being the near-
est English correlative. Dante probably meant by it the several
circles of his Hell, narrowing, one beneath the other, to the cen-
tre. As a curious specimen of English we subjoin Professor de
Vericour's translation: "I have sang the rights of monarchy; I
have sang, in exploring them, the abode of God, the Phlegethon
and the impure lakes, as long as destinies have permitted. But
as the part of myself, which was only passing, returns to better
fields, and happier, returned to his Maker, I, Dante, exiled from

138 DANTE

If these be not the words of Dante, what is internal
evidence worth? The indoniitahly self-rehant man,
loyal first of all to his most unpopular convictions
(his very host, Guido, being a Guelph), puts his
Ghibellinism (jura monarchicB) in the front. The
man whose whole life, like that of selected souls
always, had been a warfare, calls heaven another
camp, — a better one, thank God ! The wanderer
of so many years speaks of his sonl as a guest, —
glad to be gone, doubtless. The exile, whose sharp-
est reproaches of Florence are always those of an
outraged lover, finds it bitter that even his imcon-
scious bones should lie in alien soil.

Giovanni Villani, the earliest authority, and a
contemporary, thus sketches hira : " This man was
a great scholar in almost every science, though a
layman ; was a most excellent poet, philosojiher,
and rhetorician ; perfect, as well in composing and
versifying as in haranguing ; a most noble speaker.
. . . This Dante, on account of his learning, was a
little haughty, and shy, and disdainful, and like a
philosopher almost ungi-acious, knew not well how
to deal with unlettered folk." Benvenuto da Imola
tells us that he was very abstracted, as we may well
believe of a man who carried the Commedia in his
brain. Boccaccio paints him in this wise : " Our
poet was of middle height ; his face was long, his
nose aquiline, his jaw large, and the lower lip pro-
truding somewhat beyond the upper ; a little stoop-

the regions of fatherland, I am laid here, I, to -whom Florence
gave birth, a mother who experienced but a feeble love." {The
Life and Times of Dante, London, 1858, p. 208.)

])A.\TE 139

ing in the shoulders ; his eyes rather large than
small ; dark of eomplexiou ; his hair and beard
thick, crisp, and black ; and his countenance al-
ways sad and thoughtfid. His garments were al-
ways dignified ; the style such as suited ripeness of
years ; his gait was grave and gentlemanlike ; and
his bearing, whether public or private, wonderfully
composed and polished. In meat and drink he was
most temperate, nor was ever any more zealous
in study or whatever other pursuit. Seldom spake
he, save when spoken to, though a most eloquent
person. In his youth he delighted especially in
music and singing, and was intimate with almost
all the singers and musicians of his day. He was
much inclined to solitude, and familiar with few,
and most assiduous in study as far as he could find
time for it. Dante was also of marvellous capacity
and the most tenacious memory." Various anec-
dotes of him are related by Boccaccio, Sacchetti,
and others, none of them verisimilar, and some of
them at least fifteen centuries old when revamped.
Most of them are neither veri nor be7i trovati.
One clear glimpse we get of him from the Ottimo
Comento, the author of which says : ^ " I, the writer,
heard Dante say that never a rhyme had led him to
say other than he would, but that man\^ a time and
oft (molte e spesse volte) he had made words say
for him what they were not wont to express for
other poets." That is the only sincere glimpse
we get of the living, breathing, word-compelling
Dante.

' Inferno, X. 85.

140 DANTE

Looked at outwardly, the life of Dante seems to
have been an utter and disastrous failure. What
its inward satisfactions must have been, we, with
the Paradiso open before us, can form some faint
conception. To him, longing with an intensity
which only the word Dantesque will express to
realize an ideal upon earth, and continually baffled
and misunderstood, the far greater part of his ma-
ture life must have been labor and sorrow. We
can see how essential all that sad experience was to
him, can understand why all the fairy stories hide
the luck in the ugly black casket ; but to him, then
and there, how seemed it ?

Thou slialt relinquish everything of thee,
Beloved most dearly ; this that arrow is
Shot from the bow of exile first of all ;
And thou shalt prove how salt a savor hath
The bread of others, and how hard a path
To climb and to descend tlie stranger s stairs ! ^

Come sa di sale. Who never wet his bread with
tears, says Goethe, knows ye not, ye heavenly
powers ! Our nineteenth century made an idol of
the noble lord who broke his heart in verse once
every six months, but the fourteenth was lucky
enough to produce and not to make an idol of that
rarest earthly phenomenon, a man of genius who
could hold heartbreak at bay for twenty years, and
W'Ould not let himself die till he had done his task.
At the end of the Vita Ntiova^ his first work,
Dante wrote down that remarkable aspiration that
God would take him to himself after he had written
1 Paradiso, XVIL

DANTK 141

of Beatrice such things as were never j^et written of
woman. It was literally fulfilled when the Coni-
mcdia was finished twenty-five years later. Scarce
was Dante at rest in his grave when Italy felt in-
stinctively that this was her great man. Boccaccio
tells us tliat in 1329 ^ Cai-dinal Poggetto (du Poiet)
caused Dante's treatise De Jlonarchia to be pub-
licly burned at Bologna, and proposed further to
dig \iY> and burn the bones of the poet at Ravenna,
as having been a heretic ; but so much opposition
was roused that he thought better of it. Yet this
was during the pontificate of the Frenclunan, John
XXII., the reproof of whose simony Dante puts in
the mouth of St. Peter, who declares his seat va-
cant,^ whose damnation the poet himself seems to
prophesy,^ and against whose election he had en-
deavored to persuade the cardinals, in a vehement
letter. In 1350 the republic of Florence voted the
sum of ten golden florins to be paid by the hands
of Messer Giovanni Boccaccio to Dante's daughter
Beatrice, a nun in the convent of Santa Chiara at
Ravenna. In 1396 Florence voted a monument,
and begged in vain for the metaphorical ashes of
the man of whom she had threatened to make lit-
eral cinders if she could catch him alive. In 1429 *
she begged again, but Ravenna, a dead city, was
tenacious of the dead poet. In 1519 Michael An-

^ He says after the return of Louis of Bavaria to Germany
which took place iii that year. The De Monarchia was afterward
condemned by the Council of Trent.

2 Paradiso, XXVII.

^ Inferno, XI.

* See the letter in Gaye, Carteggio inedilo d' artisti, vol. i. p. 123.

142 DANTE

gelo would have built the monument, but Leo X.
refused to allow the sacred dust to be removed.
Finally, in 1829, five hundred and eight years after
the death of Dante, Florence got a cenotaph fairly
built in Santa Croce (by Kicci), ugly beyond even
the usual lot of such, with three colossal figures on
it, Dante in the middle, with Italy on one side and
Poesy on the other. The tomb at Ravenna, built
originally in 1483, by the father of Cardinal
Bembo, was lestored by Cardinal Corsi in 1692,
and finally rebuilt in its present form by Cardinal
Gonzaga, in 1780, all three of whom commemo-
rated themselves in Latin inscriptions. It is a little
shrine covered with a dome, not unlike the tomb of
a Mohammedan saint, and is now the chief magnet
which draws foreigners and their gold to Ravenna.
The valet de jtlace says that Dante is not buried
under it, but beneath the pavement of the street in
front of it, where also, he says, he saw my Lord
Byron kneel and weep. Like everything in Ra-
venna, it is dirty and neglected.

In 1373 (August 9) Florence instituted a chair
of the Div'ina Commedia, and Boccaccio was named
first professor. He accordingly began his lectures
on Sunday, October 3, following, but his comment
was broken off abruptly at the 17th verse of the
17th canto of the Inferno by the illness which
ended in his death, December 21, 1375. Among his
successors were Filippo Villani and Filelfo. Bo-
logna was the first to follow the example of Flor-
ence, Benvenuto da Imola having begun his lectures,
according to Tiraboschi, so early as 1375. Chairs

DANTE 143

were established also at Pisa, Venice, Piaeenza, and
Milan before the close of the century. The lec-
tures were delivered in the churches and on feast-
days, which shows their popular character. Balbo
reckons (but this, though probable, is guess-work)
that the MS. copies of the Divina Co7nmedia
made during the fourteenth century, and now exist-
ing in the libraries of Europe, are more numerous
than those of all other works, ancient and modern,
made during the same period. Between the inven-
tion of printing and the year 1500 more than
twenty editions were published in Italy, the earliest
in 1472. During the sixteenth century there were
forty editions ; during the seventeenth, — a period,
for Italy, of sceptical dilettantism, — only three ;
during the eighteenth, thirty-four; and already,
during the first half of the nineteenth, at least
eighty. The first translation was into Catalan, in
1428.1 M. St. Kene Taillandier says that the
Coinmedia was condemned by the inqiiisition in
Spain ; but this seems too general a statement, for,
according to Foscolo,^ it was the commentary of
Landino and Vellutello, and a few verses in the
Inferno and Paradiso^ which were condemned.
The first French translation was that of Grangier,
159G, but the study of Dante struck no root there
till the present century. Rivarol, who translated
the Inferno in 1783, was the first Frenchman who
divined the wonderful force and vitality of the

^ St. Ren^ Taillandier, in Revue des Deux Mondes, December
1, 1856, says into Spanish
- Dante, vol. iv. p. 110.

144 DANTE

Commedia} The expressions of Voltaire repre-
sent very well the average opinion of cultivated
persons in respect of Dante in the midclle of the
eighteenth century. He says : " The Italians call
him divine ; but it is a hidden divinity ; few peo-
ple understand his oracles. He has conunentators,
which, perhaps, is another reason for his not being
understood. His reputation will go on increasing,
because scarce anybody reads hira." ^ To Father
Bettinelli he writes : " I estimate higldy the cour-
age with which you have dared to say that Dante
was a madman and his work a monster." But he
adds, what shows that Dante had his admirers even
in that flippant century : " There are found among
us, and in the eighteenth century, people who strive
to admire imaginations so stupidly extravagant
and barbarous."^ Elsewhere he says that the
Commedia was " an odd poem, but gleaming with
natural beauties, a work in which the author rose
in parts above the bad taste of his age and his sub-
ject, and full of passages written as purely as if
they had been of the time of Ariosto and Tasso." ^
It is curious to see this antipathetic fascination
w^hicli Dante exercised over a nature so opposite to
his own.

At the beginning of this century Chateaubriand
speaks of Dante with vague commendation, evi-
dently from a very superficial acquaintance, and

^ Ste. Beuve, Causeries dti Lundi, tome xi. p. 1G9.

^ Diet. Phil., art. "Dante"

^ Corresp. gin., CEuvres, tome Ivii. pp. 80, 81.

* F.ssai siiT les incurs, CEuvres, tome xvii. pp. o71, o72.

DANTE 145

that only with the //(/(;v?o, probably fi'om Rivarol's
version.^ Since then there have been four or five
French versions in prose or verse, including one by
Lamennais. But the austerity of Dante will not
condescenil to the conventional elegance which
makes the charm of French, and the most virile of
poets cannot be adequately rendered in the most
feminine of languages. Yet in the works of Fau-
riel, Ozanam, Ampere, and Villemain, France has
given a greater impulse to the study of Dante than
any other country except Germany. Into Germany
the Commedia penetrated later. How utterly
Dante was unkuo^\^l there in the sixteenth century
is plain from a passage in the " Vanity of the Arts
and Sciences " of Cornelius Agrippa, where he is
spoken of among the authors of lascivious stories :
" There have been many of these historical pandars,
of which some of obscure fame, as ^F^neas Sylvius,
Dantes, and Petrarch, Boccace, Pontanus,*' etc.^
The first German translation was that of Baehen-
schwanz (1767-69). Versions by Kannegiesser,
Streckfuss, Kopisch, and Prince John of Saxony,
followed. Goethe seems never to have given that
attention to Dante which his ever-alert intelligence
might have been expected to bestow on so impos-
ing a moral and aesthetic phenomenon. Unless the
conclusion of the second part of " Faust " be an in-
spiration of the Paradiso^ we remember no ade-
quate word from him on this theme. His remarks
on one of the German translations are brief, dry,

1 G^nie du Christianisme, cap. iv.

2 Ed. Lond. 1684, p. 109.

146 DANTE

and witlifnit that breadth which comes only of
thoroujih knowk'dge and sympathy. But German
schohirship and constructive criticism, through
Witte, Kopisch, Wegele, Ruth, and others, have
been of preeminent service in deepening the un-
derstanding and facilitating the study of the poet.
In England the first recognition of Dante is by
Chaucer in the " Hugelin of Pisa " of the " Monkes
Tale," ^ and an imitation of the opening verses of
the third canto of the Inferno (" Assembly of
Foules "). In 1417 Giovanni da Serravalle, bishop
of Fermo, completed a Latin prose translation of
the Commedia, a copy of which, as he made it at
the request of two English bishops whom he met at
the council of Constance, was doubtless sent to
England. Later we find Dante now and then
mentioned, but evidently from hearsay only,^ till
the time of Spenser, who, like ]\Iilton fifty years
later, shows that he had read his works closely.
Thenceforward for more than a century Dante be-
came a mere name, used without meaning by liter-
ary sciolists. Lord Chesterfield echoes Volt:iire,
and Dr. Drake in his " Literary Hours " '^ could

1 It is worth notice, as a proof of Chaucer's critical jadgment,
that he calls Dante " the great poet of Itaille," while in the
" Gierke's Tale " he speaks of Petrarch as a " worthy clerk," as
" the laureat poete " (alluding to the somewhat sentimental cere-
mony at Rome), and says that his

' ' Rhetorike sweete
Enlumined all Itaille of poetry."

- It is probable that Sackville may have read the Inferno, and it
is certain that Sir John Harringion had. See the preface to his
translation of the Orlando Furioso.

•^ Second edition, 1800.

DA NTS 147

speak of Darwin's " Botanic Garden " as showing
tlae " wild and terrible snbliuiity of Dante " ! The
first complete English translation was by Boyd, —
of the Inferno in 1785, of the whole poem in 1802.
There have been eight other complete translations,
beginning with Gary's in 1814, six since 1850, be-
side several of the Inferno singly. Of these that
of Longfellow is the best. It is only within the
last twenty years, however, that the study of
Dante, in any true sense, became at all general.
Even Coleridge seems to have been familiar only
with the Inferno. In America Professor Tieknor
was the first to devote a special course of illustra-
tive lectures to Dante ; he was followed by Long-
fellow, whose lectures, illustrated by admirable
translations, are remembered ^^^th grateful pleasure
by many who were thus led to learn the full signi-
ficance of the great Christian poet. A translation
of the Inferno into quatrains by T. W. Parsons
ranks with the best for spirit, faithfulness, and ele-
gance. In Denmark and Russia translations of the
Inferno have been published, beside separate vol-
umes of comment and illustration. We have thus
sketched the steady growth of Dante's fame and
influence to a universality unparalleled except in
the case of Shakespeare, perhaps more remarkable
if we consider the abstruse and mystical nature of
his poetry. It is to be noted as characteristic that
the veneration of Dantophilists for their master is
that of disciples for their saint. Perhaps no other
man could have called forth such an expression as
that of Ruskin, that " the central man of all the

148 DANTE

world, as representing in perfect balance the im-
aginative, moral, and intellectual faculties, all at
their highest, is Dante."

The first remark to be made upon the WT-itings
of Dante is that they are all (with the possible
exception of the treatise De Vuh/arl Eloquio)
autobiographic, and that all of them, including
that, are parts of a mutually related system, of
which the central point is the individuality and
experience of the poet. In the Vita Nuova he
recounts the story of his love for Beatrice Porti-
nari, showing how his gTief for her loss turned his
thoughts first inward upon his ovax consciousness,
and, failing all help there, gradually upward
through philosophy to religion, and so from a world
of shadows to one of eternal substances. It traces
with exquisite unconsciousness the gradual but cer-
tain steps by which memory and imagination tran-
substantiated the woman of flesh and blood into
a holy ideal, combining in one radiant symbol of
sorrow and hope that faith which is the instinctive
refuge of unavailing regret, that grace of God
which hijjher natures learn to find in the trial
which passeth all understanding, and that perfect
womanhood, the dream of youth and the memory
of maturity, which beckons toward the forever un-
attainable. As a contribution to the physiology of
genius, no other book is to be compared with the
Vita Nuova. It is more important to the under-
standing of Dante as a poet than any other of his
works. It shows him (and that in the midst of
affairs demanding practical ability and presence

DANTE 149

of mind) capable of a depth of contemplative ab-
straction, equalling that of a Soofi who has passed
tlie fourth step of initiation. It enables us in
some sort to see how, from being the slave of his
imaginative faculty, he rose by self-culture and
force of will to that mastery of it which is art.
We comprehend the Commedia better when we
know that Dante could be an active, clear-headed
politician and a mystic at the same time. Various
dates have been assigned to the composition of
the Vita Nuova. The earliest limit is fixed by
the death of Beatrice in 1290 (though some of the
poems are of even earlier date), and the book is
commonly assvimed to have been finished by 1295 ;
Foseolo says 1294. But Professor Karl Witte,
a high authority, extends the term as far as 1300.^
The title of the book also, Vita Nuova, has been
diversely interpreted. Mr. Garrow, who published
an English version of it at Florence in 1846, enti-
tles it the " Early Life of Dante." Balbo under-
stands it in the same way.^ But we are strongly
of the opinion that " New Life " is the interpreta-
tion sustained by the entire significance of the book
itself.

His next work in order of date is the treatise
De Monarchia. It has been generally taken for
granted that Dante was a Guelph in politics up to
the time of his banishment, and that out of resent-
ment he then became a violent Ghibelline. Not to

^ Dante Alighieri's lyrische Gedichte, Leipzig, 1842, Theil II.
pp. 4-9.

2 Vita, p. 97.

150 DANTE

s))t'ak of the consideration that there is no author
whose life and works present so remarkable a
uziity and logical sequence as those of Dante, Pro-
fessor Witte has drawn attention to a fact which
alone is enough to demonstrate that the De Mo-
narchia was written before 1300. That and the

Vita JVuova are the only works of Dante in which
no allusion whatever is made to his exile. That
bitter thought was continually present to him. In
the Convito it betrays itself often, and with touch-
ing anexpectedness. Even in the treatise De

Vulgari Eloquio^ he takes as one of his examples
of style : " I have most pity for those, whosoever
they are, that languish in exile, and revisit their
countiy only in dreams." We have seen that the
one dec'isive act of Dante's priorate was to expel
from Florence the chiefs of both parties as the
sowers of strife, and he tells us (^Paradiso, XVII.)
that he had formed a party by himself. The king
of Saxony has well defined his political theory as
being " an ideal Ghibelliuism," ^ and he has been
accused of want of patriotism only by those short-
sighted persons who cannot see beyond their own
parish. Dante's want of faith in freedom was of
the same kind with Milton's refusing (as Tacitus
had done before) to confound license with liberty.
The argument of the -De 3Ionarchia is briefly this :
As the object of the individual man is the liighest
development of his faculties, so is it also with men
united in societies. But the individual can only
attain the highest development when all his powers

^ Comment on Paradiso, VI.

DANTE 151

are In absolute subjection to the intellect, and so-
ciety only when it subjects its individual caprices
to an intelligent head. This is the order of na-
ture, as in families, and men have followed it in
the organization of villages, towns, cities. Again,
since God made man in his own image, men and
societies most nearly resemble him in proportion
as they approach unity. But as in all societies
questions must arise, so there is need of a monarch
for supreme arbiter. And only a universal mon-
arch can be impartial enough for this, since kings
of limited territories would always be liable to the
temptation of private ends. AVith the internal
policy of municipalities, commonwealths, and king-
doms, the monarch would have nothing to do, only
interfering when there was danger of an infraction
of the general peace. This is the doctrine of the
first book, enforced sometimes eloquently, always
logically, and with great fertility of illustration.
It is an enlargement of some of the obiter dicta of
the Convito. The earnestness with which peace
is insisted on as a necessary postulate of civic well-
being shows what the experience had been out of
which Dante had constructed his theory. It is to
be looked on as a purely scholastic demonstration
of a speculative thesis, in which the manifold ex-
ceptions and modifications essential in practical
application are necessarily left aside. Dante al-
most forestalls the famous proposition of Cal\4n,
" that it is possible to conceive a people without a
prince, but not a prince without a people," when
he says, Non enim gens propter regem, sed e con-

152 DANTE

verso rex propter gentem} And in his letter to
the princes and peoples of Italy on the coming of
Henry VII., he bids them " obey their prince, but
so as freemen preserving their own constitutional
forms." He says also expressly: Animadverten-
dum sane, quod cum dicitur hiimanum genus jfotest
regi per 2(nu7n supremum principem, non sic intel-
ligendum est ut ah illo una prodire jjossint niuni-
cipia et leges ?nunicipales. Ilahent nainque na-
tiones, regna, et civitates inter se proprietates quas
legihiis dijferentihiis regidari oportct. Schlosser
the historian compares Dante's system with that of
the United States.^ It in some respects resembled
more the constitution of the Netherlands under the
supreme stadtholder, but parallels between ideal
and actual institutions are always imsatisfactory.^

The second book is very curious. In it Dante
endeavors to demonstrate the divine right of the
Roman Empire to universal sovereignty. One of
his argumeifts is, that Christ consented to be born
under the reign of Augustus ; another, that he as-
sented to the imperial jurisdiction in allowing him-
self to be crucified under a decree of one of its
courts. The atonement could not have been accom-
phshed unless Christ suffered under sentence of a
court having jurisdiction, for otherwise his condem-

^ Jean de Meung' had already said, —

" Ge n'en met hors rois ne pr^las

Qu'il sunt tui serf au menu pueple."
{Roman de la Hose (ed. M^on), v. ii. pp. 78, 79.)
^ Dante, Studien,ete., 1855, p. 144.
* Compare also Spinoza, Tractat. polit., cap. vi.

DANTE 153

nation would have been an injustice and not a pen-
alty. Moreover, since all nuinkiiul was typified in
tlie person of Christ, the court must have been one
having jurisdiction over all mankind ; and since
he was delivered to Pilate, an officer of Tiberius,
it must follow that the jurisdiction of Tiberius was
universal. lie draws an argument also from the
wager of battle to prove that the Roman Empire
was divinely permitted, at least, if not instituted.
For since it is admitted that God gives the victory,
and since the Romans always won it, therefore it
was God's will that the Romans should attain uni-
versal empire. In the third book he endeavors to
prove that the emperor holds by divine right, and
not by permission of the pope. He assigns suprem-
acy to the pope in spirituals, and to the emperor
in temporals. This was a delicate subject, and
though the king of Saxony (a Catholic) says that
Dante did not overstep the limits of orthodoxy, it
was on account of this part of the book that it was
condemned as heretical.^

Next follows the treatise De Vulgari Eloqido.
Though we have doubts whether we possess this
book as Dante wrote it, inclining rather to think
that it is a copy in some parts textually exact, in
others an abstract, there can be no question either
of its great glossological value or that it conveys
the opinions of Dante. We put it next in order,
though written later than the Convito^ only because,

1 It is instructive to compare Dante's political treatise with
those of Aristotle and Spinoza. We thus see more clearly the
limitations of the age in which he lived, and this may help us to
a broader view of him as poet.

154 DANTE

like the De MonarcJiia, it is written in Latin. It
is a i)roof of the national instinct of Dante, and of
his confidence in his genius, that he should have
chosen to write aU his greatest works in what was
deemed by scholars a patois, but which he more
than any other man made a classic language. Had
he intended the De Monarchia for a political pam-
plilet, he would certainly not have composed it in
the dialect of the few. The De VuUjari Eloquio
was to have been in four books. Whether it was
ever finished or not it is impossible to say; but
only two books have come down to us. It ti^eats
of poetizing in the vulgar tongue, and of the differ-
ent dialects of Italy. From the particularity with
which it treats of the dialect of Bologna, it has
been supposed to have been written in that city, or
at least to furnish an argument in favor of Dante's
having at some time studied there. In lib. ii.
cap. ii., is a remarkable passage in which, defin-
ing the various subjects of song and what had been
treated in the vulgar tongue by different poets, he
says that his own theme had been righteousness.

The Oonvito is also imperfect. It was to have
consisted of fourteen treatises, but, as we have it,
contains only four. In the first he justifies the
use of the vulgar idiom in preference to the Latin.
In the other three he comments on three of his
own Canzoni. It will be impossible to give an
adequate analysis of this work in the limits allowed
us.i It is an epitome of the learning of that age,

1 A very good one may be found in the sixth volume of the
Molini edition of Dante, pp. 391-433.

DANTE 155

philosophical, theological, and scientific. As afford-
ing illustration of the Commedla, and of Dante's
style of thought, it is invaluable. It is reckoned
by liis countrymen the first piece of Italian prose,
and there are parts of it which still stand un-
matched for eloquence and pathos. The Italians
(even such a man as Cantii among the rest) find
in it and a few passages of the Commedia the
proof that Dante, as a natural philosopher, was
wholly in advance of his age, — that he had,
among other things, anticipated Newton in the
theory of gravitation. But this is as idle as the
claun that Shakespeare had discovered the circula-
tion of the blood before Harvey,^ and one might
as well attempt to dethrone Newton because Chau-
cer speaks of the love which draws the apple to
the earth. The truth is, that it was only as a poet
that Dante was great and original (glory enough,
surely, to have not more than two competitors),
and in matters of science, as did all his contempo-
raries, sought the guiding hand of Aristotle like a
child. Dante is assumed by many to have been a
Platonist, but this is not true, in the strict sense
of the word. Like all men of great imagination,
he was an idealist, and so far a Platonist, as Shake-
speare might be proved to have been by his son-
nets. But Dante's direct acquaintance with Plato
may be reckoned at zero, and we consider it as hav-
ing strongly influenced his artistic development for
the better, that transcendentalist as he was by na-
ture, so much so as to be in danger of lapsing into

^ See Field's Theory of Colors.

1;'6 DANTE

an Oriental mysticism, his habits of thought should
have been matle precise and his genius disci])lined
by a mind so severely logical as that of Aristotle.
This does not conflict with what we believe to be
equally true, that the Platonizing commentaries on
his poem, like that of Landino, are the most satis-
factory. Beside the prose already mentioned, we
have a small collection of Dante's letters, the re-
covery of the larger number of which we owe to
Professor Witte. They are all interesting, some
of them especially so, as illustrating the prophetic
character witli which Dante invested himself. The
longest is one addressed to Can Grande della
Scala, explaining the intention of the Commedia
and the method to be employed in its interpreta-
tion. The authenticity of this letter has been
doubted, but is now generally admitted.

We shall barely allude to the minor poems, full
of grace and depth of mystic sentiment, and which
would have given Dante a high place in the his-
tory of Italian literature, even had he written noth-
ing else. They are so abstract, however, that with-
out the extrinsic interest of having been written by
the author of the Commedia, they would probably
find few readers. All that is certainly known in
regard to the Commedia is that it was composed
during the nineteen years which intervened be-
tween Dante's banishment and death. Attempts
have been made to fix precisely the dates of the
different parts, but without success, and the differ-
ences of opinion are bewildering. Foscolo has con-
structed an insrenious and forcible arffument to

DANTE 157

show that no ]iart of the })oeiu was published before
the author's death. The question depends some-
what on the meauinsf we attach to the word " pub-
lished." In an age of manuscript the wide disper-
sion of a poem so long even as a single one of the
three di^•isions of the Cammed ia would be accom-
plished very slowly. But it is difficult to account
for the great fame which Dante enjoyed during
the latter years of his life, unless we suppose that
parts, at least, of his greatest work had been read
or heard by a large number of persons. This
need not, however, imply publication ; and Witte,
whose opinion is entitled to great consideration,
supposes even the Inferno not to have been fin-
ished before 1314 or 1315. In a matter where
certainty woidd be impossible, it is of little con-
sequence to reproduce conjectural dates. In the
letter to Can Grande, before alluded to, Dante him-
self has stated the theme of his song. He says that
" the literal subject of the whole work is the state of
the soul after death simply considered. But if the
work be taken allegorically, the subject is man, as
by merit or demerit, through freedom of the will,
he renders himself liable to the reward or punish-
ment of justice." He tells us that the work is to
be interpreted in a literal, allegorical, moral, and
anagogical sense, a mode then commonly employed
with the Scriptures,^ and of which he gives the fol-
lowing example : " To make which mode of treat-
ment more dear, it may be applied in the following
verses : In exitu Israel de ^(/i/pto, domus Jacob

1 As by Dante himself in the Convito.

158 DANTE

de pojyulo barbaro, facta est Judma sanctificatio
f'jiis^ Israel potestas ejus.^ For if we look only at
the literal sense, it signifies the going" out of the
children of Israel from Egypt in the time of Moses ;
if at the allegorical, it signifies our redemption
through Christ ; if at the moral, it signifies the
conversion of the soul from the grief and misery
of sin to a state of grace ; and if at the anagogical,
it signifies the passage of the blessed soul from the
bondage of this corruption to the freedom of eternal
glory." A Latin couplet, cited by one of the old
commentators, puts the matter compactly together
for us : —

' ' Litera gesta ref ert ; quid credas allegoria ;
Moralis quid agas ; quid speres anagogia.''^

Dante tells us that he calls his poem a comedy be-
cause it has a fortunate ending, and gives its title
thus : " Here begins the comedy of Dante Alighieri,
a Florentine by birth, but not in morals." ^ The
poem consists of three parts, Hell, Purgatory, and
Paradise. Each part is divided into thirty -three
cantos, in allusion to the years of the Saviour's life ;
for though the Hell contains thirty-four, the first
canto is merely introductory. In the form of the
verse (triple rhyme) we may find an emblem of
the Trinity, and in the three divisions, of the three-
fold state of man, sin, grace, and beatitude. Sym-
bolic meanings reveal themselves, or make them-
selves suspected, everywhere, as in the architecture
of the Middle Ages. An analysis of the poem

^ Psalm cxiv. 1, 2.

'" He commonly prefaced his letters with some such phrase j
exul immeritus-

DANTE 159

would be out of place lieiv, but we must say a few
words of Dante's position as respects modern litera-
ture. If we except Wolfram von Esclienbaeh, he is
the first Christian poet, the first (indeed, we might
say the only) one whose whole system of thought is
colored in every finest fibre by a purely Christian
theology. Lapse through sin, mediation, and re-
demption, these are the subjects of the three parts
of the poem : or, otherwise stated, intellectual con-
viction of the result of sin, typified in Virgil (sym-
bol also of that imperialism whose origin he sang) ;
moral conversion after repentance, by divine grace,
typified in Beatrice ; reconciliation with God, and
actual blinding vision of him — " The pure in
heart shall see God." Here are general truths
which any Christian may accept and find comfort
in. But the poem comes nearer to us than this.
It is the real history of a brother man, of a tempted,
purified, and at last triumphant human soul ; it
teaches the benign ministry of sorrow, and that the
ladder of that faith by which man climbs to the
actual fruition of things not seen ex quovis ligno
lion Jit, but only of the cross manfully borne. The
poem is also, in a very intimate sense, an apotheosis
of woman. Indeed, as Marvell's drop of dew mir-
rored the whole firmament, so we find in the Corn-
media the image of the Middle Ages, and the sen-
timental gyniolatry of chivalry, which was at best
but skin-deep, is lifted in Beatrice to an ideal and
universal plane. It is the same with Catholicism,
with imperialism, with the scholastic philosophy ;
and nothing is more wonderful than the power of

160 DANTE

absorption and assimilation in this man, who could
take up into himself the world that then was, and
reproduce it with such cosmopolitan truth to human
nature and to his own individuality, as to reduce
all contemporary history to a mere comment on his
vision. We protest, therefore, against the parochial
criticism which would degrade Dante to a mere par-
tisan, which sees in him a Luther before his time,
and would clap the ho7inet rouge upon his heavenly
muse.

Like all great artistic minds, Dante was essen-
tially conservative, and, arriving precisely in that
period of transition when Church and Empire were
entering upon the modern epoch of thought, he
strove to preserve both by presenting the theory of
both in a pristine and ideal perfection. The whole
nature of Dante was one of intense belief. There
is proof upon proof that he believed himself in-
vested with a divine mission. Like the Hebrew
prophets, with whose writings his whole soul was
imbued, it was back to the old worship and the God
of the fathers that he called his people ; and not
Isaiah himself was more destitute of that humor, that
sense of ludicrous contrast, which is an essential in
the composition of a sceptic. In Dante's time, learn-
ing had something of a sacred character ; the line
was hardly yet drawn between the clerk and the
possessor of supernatural powers ; it was with the
next generation, with the elegant Petrarch, even
more truly than with the kindly Boccaccio, that the
purely literary life, and that dilettantism, which is
the twin sister of scepticism, began. As a merely

DANTE 161

literary figure, the position of Dante is remarkable.
Not only as respects thought, but as respects aBsthet-
ics also, his great poem stands as a monument on
the boundary line between the ancient and modern.
He not only marks, but is in liimself, the transi-
tion. A)'/)ia vinnnque cano, that is the motto of
classic song ; the things of this world and great
men. Dante says, subjectum est homo, not vir ;
my theme is man, not a man. The scene of the
old ejiic and drama was in this world, and its ca-
tastrophe here ; Dante lays his scene in the human
soul, and his fifth act in the other world. He
makes himself the protagonist of his own drama.
In the Commedia for the first time Christianity
wholly revolutionizes Art, and becomes its seminal
principle. But aesthetically also, as well as mor-
ally, Dante stands between the old and the new,
and reconciles them. The theme of his poem is
purely subjective, modern, what is called romantic ;
but its treatment is objective (almost to realism,
here and there), and it is limited by a form of
classic severity. In the same way he sums up in
himself the two schools of modern poetry which had
preceded him, and, while essentially lyrical in his
subject, is epic in the handling of it. So also he
combines the deeper and more abstract religious
sentiment of the Teutonic races with the scientific
precision and absolute systematism of the Romanic.
In one respect Dante stands alone. While we can
in some sort account for such representative men
as Voltaire and Goethe (nay, even Shakespeare)
by the intellectual and moral fermentation of the

IQ2 DANTE

age in which they lived, Dante seems morally iso-
lated and to have drawn his inspiration almost
wholly from his own internal reserves. Of his
mastery in style we need say little here. Of his
mere language, nothing could be better than the ex-
pression of liivarol : "■ His verse holds itself erect
by the mere force of the substantive and verb, with-
out the help of a single epithet." We will only add
a word on what seems to us an extraordinary mis-
apprehension of Coleridge, who disparages Dante
by comparing his Lucifer with Milton's Satan. He
seems to have forgotten that the precise measure-
ments of Dante were not prosaic, but absolutely de-
manded by the nature of his poem. He is describ-
ing an actual journey, and his exactness makes a
part of the verisimilitude. We read the " Paradise
Lost " as a poem, the Commedia as a record of
fact ; and no one can read Dante without believing
his story, for it is plain that lie believed it himself.
It is false aesthetics to confound the grandiose with
the imaginative. Milton's angels are not to be
compared with Dante's, at once real and supernat-
ural ; and the Deity of Milton is a Calvinistic Zeus,
while nothing in all poetry approaches the imagi-
native grandeur of Dante's vision of God at the
conclusion of the Paradiso. In all literary history
there is no such figure as Dante, no such homoge-
neousness of life and works, such loyalty to ideas,
such sublime irreeognition of the unessential ; and
there is no moral more touching than that the
contemporary recognition of such a nature, so en-
dowed and so faithful to its endowment, should be

DANTE 163

summed up iu the sentence of Florence : Igne
comhuratur sic quod jnoriatury

The range of Dante's influence is not less re-
mai'kable than its intensity. Minds, the antipodes
of each other in temper and endowment, alike feel
the force of his attraction, the pervasive comfort of
his light and warmth. Boccaccio and Lamennais
are touched with the same reverential enthusiasm.
The imaginative Ruskin is rapt by him, as we have
seen, perhaps beyond the limit where critical appre-
ciation merges in enthusiasm ; and the matter-of-
fact Schlosser tells us that " he, who was wont to
contemplate earthly life wholly in an earthly light,
has made use of Dante, Landino, and Vellutello in
his solitude to bring a heavenly light into his in-
ward life." Almost all other poets have their sea-
sons, but Dante penetrates to the moral core of
those who once fairly come within his sphere, and
possesses them wholly. His readers turn students,
his students zealots, and what was a taste becomes
a religion. The homeless exile finds a home in
thousands of grateful hearts. E venne da esilio
in questa pace !

^ In order to fix more precisely u» the mind the place of Dante
in relation to the history of thought, literature, and events, we
subjoin a few dates : Dante born. 12(5.") ; end of Crusades, death of
St. Louis, 1270 ; Aquinas died, 1274; Bonaventura died, 1274;
Giotto born, 1276; Albertus Magnus died. 1280 ; Sicilian vespers,
1282; death of Ugolino and Francesca da Rimini, 1282 ; death of
Beatrice, 1290 ; Roger Bacon died, 1292 ; death of Cimabue, 1.302 ;
Dante's banishment, 1302; Petrarch born, 1.S04; Fra Doleino
burned, 1.307 ; Pope Clement V. at Avignon, loO'.l; Templars sup-
pressed, 1312 ; Boccaccio born, 1313 ; Dante died, 1321 ; Wycliffe
born, 1324 ; Chaucer born, 1328.

164 DANTE

Every kind of objection, aesthetic and other, may
be, and has been, made to the Divhia Commedia,
especially by critics who have but a superficial ac-
quaintance with it, or rather with the Inferno,
which is as far as most English critics go. Cole-
ridge himself, who had a way of divining what was
in books, may be justly suspected of not going fur-
ther, though with Gary to help him. Mr. Carlyle,
who has said admirable things of Dante the man,
was very imperfectly read in Dante the author, or
he would never have i)ut Sordello in hell and the
meeting with Beatrice in paradise. In France it
was not much better (though liivarol has said the
best thing hitherto of Dante's parsimony of epi-
thet ^) before Ozanam, wlio, if with decided ultra-
montane leanings, has written excellently well of
our poet, and after careful study. Voltaire, though
not without relentings toward a poet who had put
popes heels upward in hell, regards him on the
whole as a stupid monster and barbarian. It was
no better in Italy, if we may trust Eoscolo, who
affirms that " neither Pelli nor others deservedly
more celebrated than he ever read attentively the
poem of Dante, perhaps never ran through it from

^ Rivarol characterized only a single quality of Dante's style,
■who knew how to spend as well as spare. Even the Inferno, on
which he based his remark, niig-ht have put him ou his guard.
Dante understood very well the use of ornament in its fitting
place. Est enim exornatio aliciijus convenieutis aclditio, he tells us
in his De Vulgari Eloquio (lib. ii. C. ii.). His simile of the
doves {Inferno, V. 82 et seq.), perhaps the most exquisite in all
poetry, quite oversteps Riviirol's narrow limit of " substantive and
T«rb."

DANTE 1G5

the first verse to the last." ^ Accordingly we have
heard that the Commedia was a sermon, a politiejil
pamphlet, the revengeful satire of a disappointed
Ghibelline, nay, worse, of a turncoat Guelph. It
is narrow, it is bigoted, it is savage, it is theologi-
cal, it is mediaeval, it is heretical, it is scholastic, it
is obscure, it is pedantic, its Italian is not that of la
Orusca, its ideas are not those of an enlightened
eighteenth century, it is everj-thing, in short, that a
poem should not be ; and yet, singularly enough,
the circle of its charm has widened in proportion
as men have receded from the theories of Church
and State which are supposed to be its foundation,
and as the modes of thought of its author have be-
come more alien to those of his readers. In spite
of all objections, some of wliich are well founded,
the Coinmedia remains one of the three or four uni-
versal books that have ever been written.

We may admit, with proper limitations, the mod-
em distinction between the Artist and the Moralist.
With the one Form is all in all, with the other
Tendency. The aim of the one is to delight, of the
other to convince. The one is master of his pur-
pose, the other mastered by it. The whole range
of perception and thought is valuable to the one
as it will minister to imagination, to the other only
as it is available for argument. With the moralist
use is beauty, good only as it serves an ulterior
purpose ; with the artist beauty is use, good in and
for itself. In the fine arts the vehicle makes part
of the thought, coalesces with it. The living con-

1 Discorso sul teslo, ec, § XVIII.

166 DANTE

ception shapes itself a body in marble, color, or
modulated sound, and henceforth the two are insep-
arable. The results of the moralist pass into the
intellectual atmosphere of mankind, it matters lit-
tle by what mode of conveyance. But where, as
in Dante, the religious sentiment and the imagina-
tion are both organic, something interfused with
the whole being of the man, so that they work in
kindly sympathy, the moral will insensibly suffuse
itself with beauty as a cloud with light. Then that
fine sense of remote analogies, awake to the asso-
nance between facts seemingly remote and unre-
lated, between the outward and inward worlds,
though convinced that the things of this life are
shadows, will be persuaded also that they are not
fantastic merely, but imply a substance somewhere,
and ^vill love to set forth the beauty of the visible
image because it suggests the ineffably higher
charm of the unseen original. Dante's ideal of
life, the enlightening and strengthening of that na-
tive instinct of the soul which leads it to strive
backward toward its divine source, may sublimate
the senses till each becomes a window for the light
of truth and the splendor of God to shine through.
In him as in Calderon the jjerpetual presence of
imagination not only glorifies tlie jDhilosophy of life
and the science of theology, but idealizes both in
symbols of material beauty. Though Dante's con-
ception of the highest end of man was that he
shoidd climb through every phase of human experi-
ence to that transcendental and supersensual region
where the true, the good, and the beautiful blend

DANTE 1G7

in the white light of God, yet the prism of his im-
agination forever resolved the ray into color again,
and he loved to show it also where, entangled and
obstructed in matter, it became beautiful once more
to the eye of sense. Speculation, he tells us, is the
use, without any mixture, of our noblest part (the
reason). And this part cannot in this life have its
perfect use, which is to behold God (who is the
highest object of the intellect), except inasmuch
as the intellect considers and beholds him in his
effects.! Underlying Dante the metaphysician,
statesman, and theologian, was always Dante the
poet,^ irradiating and vivifying, gleaming through
in a picturesque phrase, or touching things unex-
pectedly with that ideal light which softens and
subdues like distance in the landscape. The stern
outline of his system wavers and melts away before
the eye of the reader in a mirage of imagination
that lifts from beyond the sphere of vision and
hauffs in serener air imasres of infinite sugijestion
projected from worlds not realized, but substantial
to faith, hope, and aspiration. Beyond the horizon

1 Convito, Tr. IV. c. xxii.

^ It is remarkable that when Dante, in 1207, as a preliminary
condition to active politics, enrolled himself in the guild of physi-
cians and apothecaries, he is qualified only with the title poeta.
The arras of the Alig-hieri (curiously suitable to him who sovra gli
altri come aquila volu) were a wing of gold in a field of azure.
His vivid sense of beauty even hovers sometimes like a corj osant
over the somewhat stifF lines of his Latin prose. For example, in
his letter to the kings and princes of Italy on the coming of Henry
VII. : " A new day brightens, revealing the dawn which already
scatters the shades of long calamity ; already the breezes of
morning gather ; the lips of heaven are reddening I "

1C8 DANTE

of speculation floats, in the passionless splendor ol
the emi^yrean, the city of our God, the Rome
whereof Christ is a Roman,^ the citadel of refuge,
even in this life, for souls purified by sorrow and
self-denial, transhumanized ^ to the divine abstrac-
tion of pure contemplation. " And it is called Em-
pyrean," he says in his letter to Can Grande,
" which is the same as a heaven blazing with fire
or ardor, not because there is in it a material fire
or burning, but a spiritual one, which is blessed
love or charity." But this splendor he bodies forth,
if sometimes quaintly, yet always vividly and most
often in types of winning grace.

Dante was a mystic with a very practical turn of
mind. A Platonist by nature, an Aristotelian by
training, his feet keep closely to the narrow path of
dialectics, because he believed it the safest, while
his eyes are fixed on the stars and his brain is busy
with things not demonstrable, save by that grace
of God which passeth all understanding, nor capa-
ble of being told unless by far-off hints and adum-
brations. Though he himself has directly explained
the scope, the method, and the larger meaning of his
greatest work," though he has indirectly pointed out
the way to its interpretation in the Convito, and
though everything he wrote is but an explanatory
comment on his own character and opinions, un-
mistakably clear and precise, yet both man and
poem continue not only to be misunderstood popu-

1 Purgatorio, XXXII. 100.

'^ Panidiso, I. 70.

^ In a letter to Can Grande (XL of the Epistolce).

DAX'IE 169

larly, l>ut also by siifh as should know better.^
That those who confiued their studies to the Com-
media should have interpreted it variously is not
wonderful, for out of the first or literal meaning
others open, one out of another, each of wider cir-
cuit and purer abstraction, like Dante's own hea-
vens, giving- and receiWng light.'- Indeed, Dante
himself is partly to blame for this. " The form or
mode of treatment," he says, " is poetic, fictive, de-
scriptive, digressive, transumptive, and withal de-
finitive, divisive, probative, improbative, and posi-
tive of examples." Here are conundrums enough,
to be sure I To Italians at home, for whom the
great arenas of political and religious specidation
were closed, the temptation to find a subtler mean-
ing than the real one was irresistible. Italians in
exile, on the other hand, made Dante the stalking-
horse from behind which they could take a long
€hot at Church and State, or at obscurer foes.^ In-
finitely touching and sacred to us is the instinct of
intense sympathy which draws these latter toward

^ Witte, Wegele, and Ruth in German, and Ozanam in French,
have rendered ignorance of Dante inexcusable among men of cul-
ture.

^ Inferno, VII. 75. "Nay, his style," says Miss Rossetti, "is
more than concise : it is elliptical, it is recondite. A first thought
often lies coiled up and hidden under a second ; the words ■which
Htate the conclusion involve the premises and develop the sub-
jecf (p. 3.)

^ A complete vocabulary of Italian billingsgate might be se-
lected from Biagioli. Or see the concluding pages of Xannucci's
excellent tract, Intorno alle voci usate da Dante, Corfu, 1840. Even
Foscolo could not always refrain. Dante should have taught them
to shun such vulgarities. See Inferno, XXX. 131-148.

170 DANTE

their gi'eat forerunner, exiil immeritii^ like them-
selves.^ But they have too often wrung a mean-
ing from Dante which is injvirious to the man and
out of keeping with the ideas of his age. The aim
in expounding a great poem sliould be, not to dis-
cover an endless variety of meanings often contra-
dictory, but whatever it has of great and perennial
significance ; for such it must have, or it would
long ago have ceased to be living and operative,
would long ago have taken refuge in the Char-
treuse of great libraries, dumb thenceforth to all
mankind. We do not mean to say that this minute
exegesis is useless or unpraiseworthy, but only that
it should be subsidiary to the larger way. It serves
to bring out more clearly what is very wonderful
in Dante, namely, the omnipresence of his memory
throughout the work, so that its intimate coherence
does not exist in spite of the reconditeness and
complexity of allusion, but is woven out of them.
The poem has many senses, he tells us, and there
can be no doubt of it ; but it has also, and this
alone will account for its fascination, a living soul

^ " My Italy, my sweetest Italy, for having loved thee too
much I have lost thee, and, perhaps, . . . ah, may God avert the
omen ! But more proud than sorrowful for an evil endured for
thee alone, I continue to consecrate my vigils to thee alone. . . .
An exile full of anguish, perchance, availed to sublime the more
in thy Alighieri that lofty soul which was a beautiful gift of thy
smiling sky ; and an exile equally wearisome and undeserved now
avaQs, perhaps, to sharpen my small genius so that it may pene-
trate into what he left written for thy instruction and for his
glory." (Rossetti. Dixamina, ec, p. 405.) Rossetti is himself a
proof that a noble mind need not be narrowed by misfortune. His
Comment (unhappily incomplete) is one of the most valuable and
suggestive.

DANTE 171

behiiul them ail and informing all, an intense sin-
gleness of purpose, a core of doctrine simple, hu-
man, and wholesome, though it be also, to use his
o\\'n phrase, the bread of angels.

Nor is this unity characteristic only of the Di-
vina Co77imcdia. All the works of Dante, with
the possible exception of the De Viilgari Eloquio
(which is unfinished), are component parts of a
Whole Duty of ^lan mutually completing and in-
terjn'eting one another. They are also, as tridy as
Wordsworth's " Prelude," a history of the growth
of a poet's mind. Like the English poet he valued
himself at a high rate, the higher no doubt after
Fortune had made him outwardly cheap. Semj)i-e
il magnanimo si magnvfica in suo cuore ; e cosi
lo pusiUatihno per contrano sempre si tiene meno
che noil e.^ As in the prose of Milton, whose strik-
ing likeness to Dante in certain prominent fea-
tures of character has been remarked by Foscolo,
there are in Dante's minor works continual allu-
sions to himself of great value as material for his
biographer. Those who read attentively will dis-
cover that the tenderness he shows toward Fran-
cesca and her lover did not spring from any friend-
ship for her family, but was a constant quality of
his nature, and that what is called his revengeful
ferocity is truly the implacable resentment of a
lofty mind and a lover of good against evil, whether
showing itself in private or public life; perhaps

' The great-minded man ever maj^nifies liimself in his heart,
and in like manner the pusillanimous holds himself less than he
is. {Convilii, Tr. I. e. 11.)

172 DANTE

hating the former manifestation of it the most be-
cause he believed it to be the root of the latter, —
a faith which those who have watelied the course
of politics in a democracy, as he had, will be in-
clined to share. His gentleness is all the more
striking by contrast, like that silken compensation
which blooms out of the thorny stem of the cactus.
His moroseness,^ his party spirit, and his personal
vindictiveness are all predicated upon the Inferno^
and upon a misapprehension or careless reading
even of that. Dante's zeal was not of that senti-
mental kind, quickly kindled and as soon quenched,
that hovers on the surface of shallow minds,

" Even as the flame of unctuous things is ■wont
To move upon the outer surface only " ; ^

it was the steady heat of an inward fire kindling the
whole character of the man througli and through,
like the minarets of his own city of Dis.^ He was,
as seems distinctive in some degree of the Latin-
ized races, an unflinching a priori logician, not un-
willing to " syllogize invidious verities," * wherever
they might lead him, like Sigier, whom he has put
in paradise, though more than suspected of hetero-
doxy. But at the same time, as we shall see, he

1 Dante's notion of virtue was not that of an ascetic, nor has
any one ever painted her in colors more soft and splendid than he
in the Convito. She is " sweeter than the lids of Juno's eyes,"
and he dwells on the delights of her love with a rapture which
kindles and purifies. So far from making- her an inquisitor, he
says expressly that she " should be gladsome and not sullen in all
her works." {Convito, Tr. I. c. 8.) "Not harsh and crabbed as
dull fools suppose ' ' !

2 Inferno, XIX. 28, 29. 3 Inferno, VIII. 70-75.
* Paradiso, X. 138.

DAXTE 173

had something of the practical good sense of that
Teutonic stock whence he di-ew a part of his blood,
which prefers a malleable syllogism that can yield
>vitliout breaking to the inevitable, but incalcidable
pressure of human nature and the stiffer logic of
events. His theory of Church and State was not
merely a fantastic one, but intended for the use
and benefit of men as they were ; and he allowed
accordingly for aberrations, to which even the law
of gravitation is forced to give place ; how much
more, then, any scheme whose very starting-point
is the freedom of the will !

We are thankful for a commentator at last who
passes dry-shod over the turhide onde of inappre-
ciative criticism, and, quietly waving aside the
thick atmosphere which has gathered about the
character of Dante both as man and poet, opens
for us his City of Doom with the divining-rod of
reverential study. Miss Rossetti comes commended
to our interest, not only as one of a family which
seems to hold genius by the tenure of gavelkind,
but as having a special claim by inheritance to a
love and understanding of Dante. She writes Eng-
lish with a purity that has in it something of fem-
inine softness with no lack of vigor or precision.
Her lithe mind winds itself with surprising grace
through the metaphysical and other intricacies of
her subject. She brings to her work the refined
enthusiasm of a cidtivated woman and the penetra-
tion of sympathy. She has chosen the better way
(in which Germany took the lead) of interpreting
Dante out of himself, the pure spring from which,

174 DANTE

and from which alone, he drew his inspiration, and
not from muddy Fra Alberico or Abbate Giovac-
chino, from stupid visions of Saint Paul or voyages
of Saint Brandan. She has written by far the
best comment that has appeared in English, and
we shoidd say the best that has been done in Eng-
land, were it not for her father's Comento anali-
tico, for excepting* which lier filial piety will thank
us. Students of Dante in the original will be
grateful to her for many suggestive hints, and
those who read him in English will find in her
volume a travelling map in which the principal
points and their connections are clearly set down.
In what we shall say of Dante we shall endeavor
only to supplement her interpretation with such
side-lights as may have been furnished us by
twenty years of assiduous study. Dante's thought
is multiform, and, like certain street signs, once
common, presents a different image according to
the point of view. Let us consider briefly what
was the plan of the Divina Cominedia and Dante's
aim in writing it, which, if not to justify, was at
least to illustrate, for warning and example, the
ways of God to man. The higher intention of the
poem was to set forth the results of sin, or unwis-
dom, and of vii'tue, or wisdom, in this life, and conse-
quently in the life to come, which is but the contin-
uation and fulfilment of this. The scene accordingly
is the spiritual world, of which we are as truly deni-
zens now as hereafter. The poem is a diary of the
human soul in its journey upwards from error
through repentance to atonement with God. To

DANTE 175

make it apprehensible by those whom it was meant
to teach, nay, from its very nature as a poem, and
not a treatise of abstract morality, it mnst set
forth everything by means of sensible types and
images.

" To speak tbus is adapted to your raind,

Since only throujjh the sense it apprehendeth
What then it worthy makes of intellect.
On this account the >cripture condescends
Unto your faculties, and feet and hands
To God attributes, and means something else." ^

Whoever has studied mediaeval art in any of its
branches need not be told that Dante's age was
one that demanded very pali)able and even revolt-
ing t}^es. As in the old legend, a drop of scald-
ing sweat from the damned soul must shrivel the
very skin of those for whom he wrote, to make
them wince if not to turn them away from evil-
doing. To consider his hell a place of phj'sical
torture is to take Circe's herd for real swine. Its
mouth yawns not only under Florence, but before
the feet of every man everywhere who goeth about
to do evil. His hell is a condition of the soul, and
he could not find images loathsome enough to ex-
press the moral deformity which is wrought by sin
on its victims, or his own abhorrence of it. Its
inmates meet you in the street every day.

" Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscribed
In one self place ; for where we are is hell,
And where hell is there we must ever be.' ' -

' Paradiso, IV. 40-45 (Longfellow's version).

2 Marlowe's Faustus. " Which way I fly is hell ; myself am
hell." (Paradise Lost, IV. 7iJ.) In the same way, o^ni dove in
cielo e Paradiso. (Paradiso, III. 88, 89.)

170 DANTE

It is our own sensual eye tliat gives evil the ap-
pearance of good, and out of a crooked hag makes
a bewitching siren. The reason enlightened by
the grace of God sees it as it truly is, full of stench
and corruption.! It is this office of reason which
Dante undertakes to perform, by divine commis-
sion, in the Inferno. There can be no doubt that
he looked upon himself as invested with the pro-
phetic function, and the Hebrew forerunners, in
whose society his soul sought consolation and sus-
tainment, certainly set him no example of observ-
ing the conventions of good society in dealing with
the enemies of God. Indeed, his notions of good
society were not altogether those of this world in
any generation. He would have defined it as mean-
ing " the peers " of Philosophy, " souls free from
wretched and vile delights and from vulgar habits,
endowed with genius and memory." ^ Dante him-
self had precisely this endowment, and in a very
surprising degree. His genius enabled him to see
and to show what he saw to others ; his memory
neither forgot nor forgave. Ver}^ hateful to his
fervid heart and sincere mind would have been the
modern theory which deals with sin as involuntary
error, and by shifting off the fault to the shoulders
of Atavism or those of Society, personified for pur-
poses of excuse, but escaping into impersonality
again from the grasp of retribution, weakens that
sense of personal responsibility which is the root
of self-respect and the safeguard of character.
Dante indeed saw clearly enough that the Di\dne
1 Purffatorio, XIX. 7-33. 2 Convito, Tr. II. c. 16.

DANTE 177

justice did at leng:tli overtake Society in the ruin
of states caused by the corruption of private, and
thence of civic, morals : but a personality so in-
tense as his could not be satisfied with such a tardy
and generalized penalty as this. " It is Thou,"
he says sternly, " who hast done this thing, and
Thou, not Society, shalt be damned for it ; nay,
damned all the worse for this jialtry subterfuge.
This is not my judgment, but that of universal
Kature ^ from before the besinniii'^ of the world." ^
Accordingly the highest reason, typified in his
guide Virgil, rebukes him for bringing compas-
sion to the judgments of God,^ and again era-
braces him and calls the mother that bore him
blessed, when he bids Filippo Argenti begone
amonof the other dogs.* This latter case shocks
our modern feelings the more rudely for the simple
pathos with which Dante makes Argenti answer
when asked who he was, " Thou seest I am one

^ La natura universale, cioe T ^ Ho. {Convito, Tr. III. c 4.)

• Inferno. III. 7, 8.

2 Inferno, XX. 30. Mr. W. M. Rossetti stranjjely enough ren-
ders this verse " Who hath a passion for God's judgeship."
Compassion porta, is the reading of the best texts, and Witte
adopts it. Buti's comment is '' cioe porta pena e dolore di colui
che giustamente e condannato da Dio che e sempre giusto.''^ There
is an analogous passage in The Revelation of the Apostle Paul,
printed in the Proceedings of the American Oriental Society (vol.
viii. pp. 21o, 214) : "And the angel answered and said, ' Where-
fore dost thou weep ? Wliy I art thou more merciful than God ? '
And I .said, ' God forbid. O my lord ; for God is good and long-
suffering unto the sons of men, and he leaves every one of them
to his own will, and he walks as he pleases.' " This is precisely
Dante's view.

♦ Inferno, VIII. 40.

178 DANTE

that weeps." Tt is also the one that makes most
strongly for the theory of Dante's personal vindic-
tiveness,^ and it may eount for what it is worth.
We are not greatly concerned to defend him on
that score, for he believed in the righteous use of
anger, and that baseness was its legitimate quarry.
He did not think the Tweeds and Fisks, the politi-
cal wire-pullers and convention-packers, of his day
merely amusing, and he certainly did think it the
duty of an upright and thoroughly trained citizen
to speak out severely and unmistakably. He be-
lieved firmly, almost fiercely, in a divine order of
the universe, a conception whereof had been vouch-
safed him, and that whatever and whoever hindei'ed
or jostled it, whether wilfully or blindly it mattered
not, was to be got out of the way at all hazards ;
because obedience to God's law, and not making
things generally comfortable, was the highest duty
of man, as it was also his only way to true felicity.
It has been commonly assumed that Dante was a
man soured by undeserved misfortune, that he took
up a wholly new outfit of jjolitical opinions with
his fallen fortunes, and that his theory of life and
of man's relations to it was altogether reshaped for
him by the bitter musings of his exile. This would

■• " I following lier (Moral Philosophy) in the work as well as
the passion, so far as I could, abominated and disparaged the
errors of men, not to the infamy and shame of the erring, but of
the errors." (Convlto, Tr. IV. e. 1.) "Wherefore in my judg-
ment as he who defames a worthy man ought to be avoided by
people and not listened to, so a \ile man descended of worthy
ancestors ought to be hunted out by all.'' (Convito, Tr. IV.
c. 29.)

DANTE 179

be singular, to say the least, in a man who tells; us
that he "felt himself indeed four-square against
the strokes of ehanee," and whose convictions were
so intimate that they were not merely intellectual
conclusions, but parts of his moral being. Fortu-
nately we are called on to believe nothing of the
kind. Dante himself has supplied us with hints
and dates which enable us to w'atcb the germina-
tion and trace the growth of his double theory of
government, applicable to man as he is a citizen of
this world, and as he hopes to become hereafter a
freeman of the celestial city. It would be of little
consequence to show in which of two equally self-
ish and short-sighted parties a man enrolled him-
self six hundred years ago, but it is worth some-
thing to know that a man of ambitious temper and
violent passions, aspiring to office in a city of fac-
tions, could rise to a level of principle so far above
them all. Dante's opinions have life in them still,
because they were drawn from living sources of re-
flection and experience, because they were reasoned
out from the astronomic laws of history and ethics,
and were not weather-guesses snatched in a glance
at the doubtful political sky of the hour.

Swiftly the politic goes : is it dark ? he borrows a lantern ;
Slowly the statesman and sure, g-uiding his feet by the stars.

It will be well, then, to clear up the chronology of
Dante's thought. When his ancestor Cacciaguida
prophesies to hira the life which is to be his after
1300,1 jjg says, speaking of his exile : —

1 Paradiso, XYII. 61-G9.

180 DANTE

" And tliat which most shall weigh upon thy shoulders
Will be the bad and foolish company
With which into this valley thou shalt fall ;

Of their bestiality their own proceedings

Shall furnish proof ; so H icill be well for thee
A party to have made thee by thyself.^''

Here both context and grammatical construction
(infallible guides in a writer so scrupulous and
exact) imply irresistibly that Dante had become a
party by himself before his exile. The measure
adopted, by the Priors of Florence while he was
one of them (with his assent and probably by his
counsel), of sending to the frontier the leading
men of both factions, confirms this implication.
Among the persons thus removed from the oppor-
tunity of doing mischief was his dearest friend
Guido Cavalcanti, to whom he had not long before
addressed the Vita Xuova} Dante evidently
looked back with satisfaction on his conduct at
this time, and thought it both honest and patriotic,
as it certainly was disinterested. " We whose
country is the world, as the ocean to the fish," he
tells us, " though we drank of the Arno in infancy,
and love Florence so much that, because ice loved
he7\ ice suffer exile unjustly^ support the shoulders

^ It is -worth mentioning that the sufferers in his Inferno are in
like manner pretty exactly divided between the two parties.
This is answer enough to the charge of partiality. He even puts
persons there for whom he felt affection (as Brnnetto Latini) and
respect (as Farinata degli Uberti and Frederick II.). Till the
French looked up their MSS., it was taken for granted that the
beccajo di Parigi ( Purgatorio, XX. 52) was a drop of Dante's gall.
"Ce fu Hu^z Capez c' on apelle bouchier." Iluyues Ca^:et, p- 1.

DANTE 181

of our jiulgmeut rather ujion reason than the
senses." ^ And again, speaking" of old age, he
says : " And the nobk^ soul at this age blesses also
the times past, and well may bless them, because,
revolving tlieni in nu'inory, she recalls her right-
eous conduct, without which she coidd not enter
the port to which she draws nigh, with so much
riches and so great gain." This language is not
that of a man who rejrrets some former action as
mistaken, still less of one v/ho repented it for any
disastrous consequences to himself. So, in jiisti-
fying a man for speaking of himself, he alleges
two examples, — that of Boethius, who did so to
" clear himself of the perpetual infamy of his ex-
ile " ; and that of Augustine, " for, by the process
of his life, which was from bad to good, from good
to better, and from better to best, he gave us ex-
ample and teaching." ^ After middle life, at least,
Dante had that wisdom " whose use brings with it
marvellous beauties, that is, contentment with every
condition of time, and contempt of those things
which others make their masters." ^ If Dante,
moreover, wrote his treatise De Monarchia before
1302, and we think Witte's inference, * from its
style and from the fact that he nowhere alludes to
his banishment in it, conclusive on this point, then
lie was already a Ghibelline in the same larger and

^ De Vulgari Eloquio, lib. i. cap. vi. Cf. Inferno, XV. G1-G4.

2 Convito, Tr. IV. c. 23. lb. Tr. I. c. 2

8 Convito. Tr. III. c. IM.

* 0pp. Min., ed. Fraticelli, vol. ii. pp. 281 and 283. Witte
is inclined to put it even ear'ier tlian 13U0, and we believe he is
right.

182 DANTE

unpartisan sense which ever after distinguished
him from his Italian contemporaries.

" Let, let the Ghibellines ply their handicraft

Beneath some other standard ; for this ever
111 follows he who it and justice parts,"

he makes Justinian say, speaking of the Roman
eagle.^ His GhibcsUinism, thougli undoubtedly the
result of what he had seen of Italian misgovern-
ment, embraced in its theoretical application the
civilized world. His jjolitical system was one
which his reason adopted, not for any temporary
exjjediency, but because it conduced to justice,
peace, and civilization, — the three conditions on
which alone freedom was possible in any sense
which made it worth having. Dante was intensely
Italian, nay, intensely Florentine, but on aU great
questions he was, by the logical structure of his
mind and its philosophic impartiality, incapable of
intellectual provincialism.^ If the circle of his
affections, as with jiersistent natures commonly,
was narrow, his thought swept a broad horizon
from that tower of absolute self which he had
reared for its speculation. Even upon the princi-
ples of poetry, mechanical and other,^ he had re-
flected more profoundly than most of those who
critiisise his work, and it was not by chance that he
discovered the secret of that magical word too few,
which not only distinguishes his verse from all

1 ParacUso, VI. 103-105.

^ Some Florentines have amusing-ly enough doubted the genu-
ineness of the De Vulgari Eloquio, because Dante therein denies
the preeminence of the Tuscan dialect.

^ See particularly the second book of the De Vulgari Eloquio.

DAME 183

other, but so strikingly from his own ])rose. He
never took the bit of art ^ between his teeth where
only poetry, antl not doctrine, was concerned.

If Dante's philosophy, on the one hand, was
practical, a guide for the conduct of life, it was, on ]
the other, a much more transcendent thing, whose ^x
body was wisdom, her soul love, and her efficient j
cause truth. It is a practice of wisdom from the \
mere love of it, for so we must interpret his ayno-
roso uso di sapicnzia, when we remember how
he has said before ^ that " the love of wisdom for \
its delight or profit is not true love of wisdom." /
And this love must embrace knowledge in all its
branches, for Dante is content with nothing less /
than a pancratic training, and has a scorn of dllet- '
tanti^ specialists, and quacks. " Wherefore none

^ Purgaturio, XXXIII. 141. "That thing one calls beautiful
whose parts answer to each other, because pleasure results from
their harmony.'' {Convito,TT. I. c. •">.) Carlyle says that "he
knew too, partly, that his work was great, the greatest a man
could do." He knew it fully. Telling us how Giotto's fame as a
painter had eclipsed that of Ciniabue. he takes an example from
poetry also, and selectirjg two Italian poets, — one the most
famous of his predecessors, the other of his contemporaries, —
calmly sets himself above them both {Pttrgatorio, XI. 97-99), and
gives the reason for his supremacy ( Purgatorio, XXIV. 49-02).
It is to be remembered that Amore in the latter passage does not
mean love in the ordinary .sense, but in that transcendental one
set forth in the Convito, — that state of the soul which opens it
for tha descent of God's spirit, to make it over into his own image.
"Therefore it is manifest that in this love the Divine virtue de-
scends into men in the guise of an angel, . . . and it is to be
noted that the descending of the virtue of one thing into another
is nothing else than reducing it to its own likeness." {Conrnto,
Tr. III. c. 14.)

2 Convito. Tr. III. c. 11. lb. Tr. I. c. 11.

184 DANTE

ought to be called a true philosopher who for any
delight loves any part of knowledge, as there are
many who delight in composing Canzoni, and de-
light to be studious in them, and who delight to be
studious in rhetoric and in music, and flee and
abandon the other sciences which are all members
of wisdom." ^ " Many love better to be held mas-
ters than to be so." With him wisdom is the
generalization from many several knowledges of
small account by themselves ; it results therefore
from breadth of culture, and would be impossible
without it. Philosophy is a noble lady (domia gen-
til -}, partaking of the divine essence by a kind of
eternal marriage, while with other intelligences she
is united in a less measure " as a mistress of whom
no lover takes complete joy." ^ The eyes of this
lady are her demonstrations, and her smile is her
persuasion. " The eyes of wisdom are her demon-
strations by which truth is beheld most certainly ;

1 Convito, Tr. III. c. 12-15.

- Inferno, II. 94. The donna gentil is Lucia, the prevenient
Grace, the light of God which shows the right path and guides the
feet in it. With Dante God is always the sun, " -which leadeth
others right by every road." (Inferno, I. IS.) "The spiritual
and unintelligible Sun, which is God." {Convito, Tr. III. c. 12.)
His light " enlighteneth every man that cometh into the world,"
but his dwelling is in the heavens. He who wilfully deprives
himself of this light is spiritually dead in sin. So when in Mars
he beholds the glorified spirits of the martyrs he exclaims, " 0
Helios, who so arrayest them ! " {Paradiso, XIV. 96. ) Blanc
(Vocabolario, sub voce) rejects this interpretation. But Dante,
entering the abode of the Blessed, invokes the "good Apollo,"
and shortly after calls him divina virtu. We shall have more to
say of this hereafter.

3 Convito, Tr. III. c. 12.

DANTE 185

and her smile is her persuasions in which the in-
terior light of ^visdom is shown under a certain
veil, and in these two is felt that highest pleasure
of beatitude which is the greatest good in para-
dise." ^ "" It is to be known that the beholding this
lady was so largely ordaine<l for us, not merely to
look upon the face which she shows us, but that
we may desire to attain the things which she keeps
concealed. And as through her much thereof is
seen by reason, so by her we believe that every
miracle may have its reason in a higher intellect,
and consequently may be. Whence our good faith
has its origin, whence comes the hope of those
unseen things which we desire, and through that
the operation of charity, by the which three virtues
we rise to philosophize in that celestial Athens
where the Stoics, Peripatetics, and Epicureans
through the art of eternal truth accordingly concur
in one will." ^

As to the double scope of Dante's philosophy we
will cite a passage from the Convito, all the more
to our purpose as it will illustrate his o^vn method

^ Convito, Tr. III. c. 1'. Recalling how the eyes of Beatrice
lift her servant through the heavenly spheres, and that smile of
hers so often dwelt on with rapture, we see how Dante was in the
habit of commenting and illustrating his own works. We must
remember always that with him the allegorical exposition is the
true one {Convilo, Tr. IV. c. 1), the allegory being a truth which
is hidden under a beautiful falsehood {Convito, Tr. II. c. 1), and
that Dante thought his poems without this exposition "under
some shade of obscurity, so that to many their beauty was more
grateful than their goodness" (Convito, Tr. I. c. 1), "because
the goodness is in the meaning, and the beauty in the ornament of
the words '' ( Convito, Tr. II. c 12).

2 Convito. Tr. III. c. 14.

186 DANTE

of allegorizing. " Verily the use of our mind is
double, that is, practical and speculative, the one
and the other most delightful, although that of con-
templation be the more so. That of the practi-
cal is for us to act virtuously, that is, honorably,
with prudence, temperance, fortitude, and justice.
[These are the four stars seen by Dante, Purgato-
riOf I. 22, 27.] That of the speculative is not to
act for ourselves, but to consider the works of God
and nature. . . . Verily of these uses one is more
full of beatitude than the other, as it is the specu-
lative, which without any admixture is the use of
our noblest part. . . . And this part in this life
cannot have its use perfectly, which is to see God,
except inasmuch as the intellect considers him and
beholds him through his effects. And that we
should seek this beatitude as the highest, and not
the other, the Gospel of INIark teaches us if we will
look well. Mark says that Mary Magdalene, Mary
the mother of James, and Mary Salome went to
find the Saviour at the tomb and found him not,
but found a youth clad in white who said to them,
' Ye seek the Saviour, and I say unto you that he
is not here ; and yet fear ye not, but go and say
unto his disciples and Peter that he will go before
them into Galilee, and there ye shall see him even
as he told you.' By these three womea may be un-
derstood the three sects of the active life, that is,
the Epicureans, the Stoics, and the Peripatetics,
who go to the tomb, that is, to the present life,
which is a receptacle of things corruptible, and seek
the Saviour, that is, beatitude, and find him not.

DANTE 187

but they find a youth in white raiment, who, ac-
corcliug- to the testimony of Matthew and the rest,
was an angel of God. This angel is that nobleness
of ours which comes from God, as hath been said,
which speaks in our reason and says to each of
these sects, that is, to whoever goes seeking beati-
tude in this life, that it is not here, but go and say
to the disciples and to Peter, that is, to those who
go seeking it and those who are gone astray (like
Peter who had denied), that it will go before them
into Galilee, that is, into specidation. Galilee is
as much as to say Whiteness. Whiteness is a
body full of corporeal light more than any other,
and so contemplation is fuller of spiritual light
than anything else here below. And he says, ' it
will go before,' and does not say, ' it will be with
you,' to give us to understand that God always goes
before our contemplation, nor can we ever over-
take here Him who is our supreme beatitude. And
it is said, ' There ye shall see him as he told you,'
that is, here ye shall have of his sweetness, that is,
felicity, as is promised you here, that is, as it is or-
dained that ye can have. And thus it appears that
we find our beatitude, this felicity of which we are
speaking, first imperfect in the active life, that is,
in the operations of the moral virtues, and after-
wards wellnigh perfect in the operation of the in-
tellectual ones, the which two operations are speedy
and most direct ways to lead to the supreme beati-
tude, the which cannot be had here, as appears by
what has been said." ^

1 Convito, Tr. IV. e. 22.

188 DANTE

At first sight there may seem to be some want of
agreement in what Dante says here of the soul's
ineapjicity of the vision of God in this life with the
tiiumphant conclusion of his o\vn poem. But hero
as elsewhere Dante must be completed and ex-
plained by himself. " We must know that every-
thing most greatly desires its own perfection, and
in that its every desire is appeased, and by that
everj'thing is desired. [That is, the one is drawn
toward, the other draws.] And this is that desire
which makes every delight maimed, for no delight
is so gi"eat in this life that it can take away from
the sold this thirst so that desire remain not in the
thought." ^ *' And since it is most natural to wish
to be in God, the human soul naturally wills it
with all longing. And since its being depends on
God and is preserved thereby, it naturally desires
and wiUs to be united with God in order to fortify
its being. And since in the goodnesses of human
nature is shown some reason for those of the Divine,
it follows that the human soul unites itself in a
spiritual way with those so much the more strongly
and quickly as they appear more perfect, and this
appearance happens according as the knowledge of
the soul is clear or impeded. And this union is
what we call Love, whereby may be known what is
witliin the soul, seeing those it outwardly loves.
. . . And the human soul which is ennobled with
the ultimate potency, that is, reason, participates
in the Divine nature after the manner of an eternal
Intelligence, because the soul is so ennobled and
1 Convito, Tr. III. c- 6.

DANTE 189

denuded of matter in that sovi'an potency that the
DiWue light shines in it as in an angel." ^ This
union with God may therefore take place before
the warfare of life is over, but is only possible for
souls pc7^ctta?ncnte naturati, perfectly endowed by
nature.^ This dei>ends on the virtue of the gener-
ating soul and the concordant influence of the
planets. " And if it happen that through the pu-
rity of the recipient soul, the intellectual virtue be
well abstracted and absolved from every corporeal
shadow, the Divine bounty is multiplied in it as in
a thing sufficient to receive the same." ^ " And
there are some who believe that if all the aforesaid
virtues [powers] shoidd unite for the production
of a soul in their best disposition, so much of the
Deity would descend into it that it woidd be al-
most another incarnate God." ^ Did Dante believe
himself to be one of these ? He certainly gives us
reason to think so. He was born under fortunate
stars, as he twice tells us,^ and he puts the middle
of his own life at the thirty-fifth year, which is the
period he assigns for it in the diviner sort of men.^
The stages of Dante's intellectual and moral

^ Convito, Tr. III. c. 2. By potenzia and potenza Dante means
the faculty of receiving influences or impressions. {Paradise,
XIII. Gl ; XXIX. ;>4. ) Reason is the " sovran potency" because
it makes us capable of GoA

^ " O thou well-born, unto whom Grace concedes
To see the thrones of the Eternal triumph,
Or ever yet the warfare be abandoned."

(Paradiso, V. 115-118.)
« Convito, Tr. IV. c. 21. * Convito, Tr. III. c. 7-

5 Inferno, X. 55, 5G; Paradiso, XXII. 112-117.
« Convito, Tr. I. c. 23 (cf. In/erno, L IV.).

190 DANTE

gi'owth may, we think, be reckoned with some ap-
})roach to exactness from data supplied by himself.
In the poems of the Vita JVuova, Beatrice, until
her death, was to him simply a poetical ideal, a
tyjje of absti'iict beauty, chosen according to the
fasliion of the day after the manner of the Proven-
cal poets, but in a less carnal sense than theirs.
" And by the fourth nature of animals, that is, the
sensitive, man has another love whereby he loves
according to sensible appearance, even as a beast.
. . . And by the fifth and final nature, that is, the
truly human, or, to speak better, angelic, that is,
rational, man has a love for truth and virtue. . . .
Wherefore, since this nature is called mind, I said
that love discoursed in my mind to make it under-
stood that this love was that which is born in the
noblest of natures, that is, [the love] of truth and
virtue, and to shut out every false opinion hyichich
it miglit he suspected that my love ivasfor the de-
Ucjht of sense." ^ This is a very weighty affirma-
tion, made, as it is, so deliberately by a man of
Dante's veracity, who would and did speak truth
at every hazard. Let us dismiss at once and for-
ever all the idle tales of Dante's amours, of la
Montanina, Gentucca, Pietra, Lisetta, and the
rest, to that outer darkness of impure thoughts la
onde la stoltezza dipartille? We think Miss Ros-

1 Convito, It. III. c. 3 ; Paradiso, XVIII. 108-130.

^ See an excellent discussion and elucidation of this matter by
Witte, who so higlily deserves the gratitude of all students of
Dante, in Dante Alighieri's Lyrische Gedichte, Theil II. pp. 48-
57. It was kindly old Boccaccio, who, without thinking any harm,
first set this nonsense a-going. His Life of iJante is mainly

DANTE 191

setti a little hasty in allowing that in the years
which immediately followed Beatrice's death Dante
gave himself up " more or less to sensual gratifica-
tion and eartlily aim." The earthl^'^ aim we in a
certain sense admit ; the sensual gratification we
reject as utterly inconsistent, not only with Dante's
principles, but with his character and indefatigable
industry. Miss Rossetti illustrates her position by
a subtle remark on " the lulling spell of an intel-
lectual and sensitive delight in good running par-
allel with a voluntary and actual indulgence in
evil." The dead Beatrice beckoned him toward
the life of contemplation, aud it was precisely dur-
ing this period that he attempted to find happiness

a rhetorical exercise. After making Dante's marriage an excuse
for revamping all the old slanders against matrimony, he adds
gravely, " Certainly I do not affirm these things to have happened
to Dante, for I do not know it, though it be true that (whetlier
things like these or others were the cause of it), once parted from
her, he would never come where she was nor suffer her to come
where he was, for all that she was the mother of several children
by him." That he did not come to her is not wonderful, for he
would have been burned alive if he had. Dante could not send
for her because he was a homeless wanderer. She remained in
Florence with her children becau.se she had powerful relations and
perhaps property there. It is plain, also, that what Boccaccio
says of Dante's lussuria had no better foundation. It gave him a
chance to turn a period. He gives no particulars, and his general
statement is simply incredible. Lionardo Bruni and Vellutello
long ago pointed out the trifling and fictitious character of this
Life. Those familiar with Dante's allegorical diction will not
lay much stress on the literal meaning of pargoletla in Purgatono,
XXXI. 59. Gentucca, of course, was a real person, one of those
who had shown hospitality to the exile. Dante remembers them
all somewhere, for gratitude (which is quite as rare as genius)
was one of the virtues of his unforgetting nature. Boccaccio's
Comment is later and far more valuable than the Life.

192 DANTE

in the life of action. " Verily it is to be known
that we may in tliis life have two felicities, follow-
ing two ways, good and best, which lead us thither.
The one is the active, the other the contemplative
life, the which (though by the active we may at-
tain, as has been said, unto good felicity) leads us
to the best felicity and blessedness." ^ " The life
of my heart, that is, of my inward self, was wont
to be a sweet thought which went many times to
the feet of God, that is to say, in thought I contem-
plated the kingdom of the Blessed. And I tell
the final cause why I mounted thither in thought
when I say, ' Where it [the sweet thought] beheld
a lady in glory,' that I might make it understood
that I was and am certain, by her gracious revela-
tion, that she icas in heaven, [not on earth, as I
had vainly imagined,] whither I went in thought,
so often as was possible to me, as it were rapt." ^
This passage exactly answers to another in Purgor
tono, XXX. 109-138: —

" Not only by tlie work of those great wheels
That destine every seed unto some end,
According as the stars are in conjunction,
Hut by the largess of celestial graces,

Such had this man become in his New Life
Potentially, that every righteous habit
Would have made admirable proof in him ;

Some time did I sustain him with my look (volto) ;
Revealing unto him my youthful eyes,
I led him with me turned in tlie right way.

1 Convlto, Tr. IV. e. 17 ; Purgatorio, XXVII. 100-108.

2 Convito, Tr. II. c. 8.

DANTE 193

As soon as ever of ray second ago

I was upon the threshold and changed life,
Himself from me he took and gave to othera.

When from the Hesh to spirit I ascended,

And beauty and virtue were in me increased,
I was to him less dear and less delightful ;

And into ways untrue he turned his steps,
Pursuing the false images of good.
That never any promises fulfil '

Nor prayer for inspiration me availed,'^

By means of tvhich in dreams and otherwise
I called him back, so little did he heed them.

JSo low he fell, that all appliances

For his salvation were already short,

Save showing him the people of perdition."

Now Dante himself, we think, gives iis the clue,
by folloNdng which we may reconcile the contra-
diction, what Miss Rossetti calls " the astounding
discrepancy," between the Lady of the Vita Kuova
who made him unfaithful to Beatrice, and the same
Lady in the Convito, who in attributes is identical
with Beatrice herself. We must remember that
the prose part of the Convito^ which is a comment
on the Canzoni, was written after the Canzoni
themselves. Plow long after we cannot say with
certainty, but it was plainly composed at intervals,
a part of it prol^ably after Dante had entered upon
old age (which began, as he tells us, with the forty-
fifth year), consequently after 1310. Dante had

^ That is, wholly fulfil, rendono intera.

^ We should prefer here,

" Nor iiLspirations won by prayer availed,"
as better expressing Ne /' impetrare spirazion. Mr Longfellow's
translation is so admirable for its exactness as well as its beauty
that it may be thankful for the minutest criticism, such only be-
ing possible.

194 DANTE

then wTitten a considerable part of the Divina
Commedia, in which Beatrice was to go through
her final and most ethereal transformation in his
mind and memory. We say in his memory, for
such idealizations have a very subtle retrospective
action, and the new condition of feeling or thought
is uneasy till it has half unconsciously brought into
harmony whatever is inconsistent with it in the
past. The inward life un^\^llingly admits any
break in its continuity, and nothing is more com-
mon than to hear a man, in venting an opinion
taken up a week ago, say with perfect sincerity,
"I have always thought so and so." Whatever
belief occupies the whole mind soon produces the
impression on us of having long had possession of
it, and one mode of consciousness blends so insensi-
bly with another that it is impossible to mark by
an exact line where one begins and the other ends.
Dante in his exposition of the Canzoni must have
been subject to this subtlest and most deceitful of
influences. He would try to reconcile so far as he
conscientiously could his present with his past.
This he coidd do by means of the allegorical inter-
pretation. "For it woidd be a great shame to
him," he says in the Vita Nuova^ " who should
poetize something under the vesture of some figure
or rhetorical color, and afterwards, when asked,
coidd not strip his words of that vesture in such
wise that they should have a true meaning." Now
in the literal exposition of the Canzone beginning,
*' Voi die intendendo il terzo ciel movcte," ^ he
^ Which he cites in the Paradiso, VIII. 37.

DANTE 195

tells us that the grandezza of the Donna Gentil
was " temporal greatness " (one certainly of the
felicities attainable by way of the vita attiva^, and
immediately after gives us a hint by which we may
comprehend why a proud ^ man might covet it.
" How much wisdom and how great a persistence
in virtue {ahito virtuoso) are hidden for want of
this lustre ! " ^ When Dante reaches the Terres-
trial Paradise ^ which is the highest felicity of this
world, and therefore the consummation of the Ac-
tive Life, he is welcomed by a Lady who is its

symbol,

'* Who went along

Singing and culling floweret after floweret,"

and warming herself in the rays of Love, or " ac-
tual speculation," that is, " where love makes its
peace felt." ^ That she was the symbol of this is
evident from the previous dream of Dante, '' in
which he sees Leah, the universally accepted type
of it,

" Walking in a meadow,
Gathering flowers ; and singing she was sajdng,
' Know whosoever may my name demand

That I am Leah, and go moving round

My beauteous hands to make myself a garland,' "

that is to say, of good works. She, having " washed
him thoroughly from sin," ^

^ Dante confesses his guiltiness of the sin of pride, which (as
appears by the examples he g^ves of it) included ambition, in Pur-
gatorio, XIII. 136, 137.

- Convito, Tr. II. c. 11, 3 Purgatorio, XXVIII.

* Purgatorio, XXVIII. 40-44 ; Convito, Tr. III. c. 13.

5 Purgatorio, XXYII. !t4-Kl.-,.

^ Psalm li. 2. " And therefore I say that her [Philosophy's]

196 DANTE

"All dripping brought
Into the dance of the four beautiful," *

who are the intellectual virtues Prudence, Justice,
Temperance, and Fortitude, the four stars, guides
of the Practical Life, which he had seen when he
came out of the Hell where he had beheld the re-
sults of sin, and arrived at the foot of the Mount
of Purification. That these were the special vir-
tues of practical goodness Dante had already told
us in a passage before quoted from the Convito?
That this was Dante's meaning is confirmed by
what Beatrice says to liim,^

' ' Short while shalt thou be here a forester (silvano)
And thou shalt be with me forevermore
A citizen of that Rome where Christ is Roman " ;

for by a *' forest " he always means the world of life
and action.^ At the time when Dante was writing
the Ckmzoni on which the Convito was a comment,
he believed science to be the " ultimate perfection
itself, and not the way to it," ^ but before the Con-
vito was composed he had become aware of a higher
and purer light, an inward light, in that Beatrice,
already olarified wellnigh to a mere image of the
mind, " who lives in heaven with the angels, and on
earth with my soul." ^

beauty, that is. morality, rains flames of fire, that is, a righteous
appetite which is generated in the love of moral doctrine, the
which appetite removes us from the natural as well as other
vices." {Convito, Tr. III. c. 15.)

1 Purgatorio, XXXI. 10?., 104. 2 Tr. IV. c. 22.

8 Purgatorio, XXXII. 10&-102.

^ Such is the selva oscura (Inferno, I. 2), such the selva erronea
di questa vita {Convito, Tr. IV. c. 24).

6 Convito, Tr. I. c. V-i. '' Convito, Tr. II. c. 2.

DA NTE 197

So spii'itually does Dante always present Bea-
trice to us, even where most corporeal, as in the
Vita Kuova^ that many, like Biscione and Rossetti,
have doubted her real existence. But surely we
must consent to believe that she who speaks of

" The fair limbs ■wherein
I was enclosed, which scattered are in earth,"

was once a creature of flesh and blood, —

" A creature not too bright and good
For human nature's daily food."

When she died, Dante's grief, like that of Con-
stance, filled her room up with something fairer
than the reality had ever been. There is no ideal-
izer like unavailing regret, all the more if it be a
regret of fancy as much as of real feeling. She
early began to undergo that change into something
rich and strange in the sea ^ of his mind which so
completely supernaturalized her at last. It is not
impossible, we think, to follow the process of trans-
formation. During the period of the Convito Can-
zoni, when he had so given himself to study that
to his weakened eyes " the stars were shadowed
with a white blur," ^ this star of his imagination
was eclipsed for a time with the rest. As his
love had never been of the senses (which is bes-
tial ^), so his sorrow was all the more ready to be
irradiated with celestial light, and to assume her to
be the transmitter of it who had first awakened in
him the nobler impiilses of his nature, —

^ Mar di tutto il senno, he calls Virgil (Inferno, ^^II. 7). Those
familiar with his own works will tliink tlie phrase singularly ap
plicable to himself.

2 Convito, Tr. III. c. 9. ^ Coni-ito, Tr. III. c. 3.

198 DANTE

(" Such had this man become in his Now Life
Potentially,")

and given liim the first hints of a higher, nay, of
the highest good. With that turn for double mean-
ing and abstraction which was so strong in him,
her very name helped him to allegorize her into
one who makes blessed (beat^, and thence the step
was a short one to personify in her that Theosophy
which enables man to see God and to be mystically
united with him even in the flesh. Already, in the
Vita JVuova,^ she appears to him as afterwards in
the Terrestrial Paradise, clad in that color of flame
which belongs to the seraphim who contemplate
God in himself, simply, and not in his relation to
the Son or the Holy Spirit.^ When misfortune
came upon him, when his schemes of worldly activ-
ity failed, and science was helpless to console, as it
had never been able wholly to satisfy, she already
rose before him as the lost ideal of his youth, re-
proaching him with his desertion of purely spirit-
ual aims. It is, perhaps, in allusion to this that he
fixes the date of her death with such minute pre-
cision on the 9th June, 1390, most probably his
own twenty-fifth birthday, on which he passed the
boundary of adolescence.^

That there should seem to be a discrepancy be-
tween the Lady of the Vita Nuova and her of the

1 Vita Nuova, XI. 2 y{ta Nuova, Tr. II. c. 6.

^ Convito, Tr. IV. c. 24. The date of Dante's hirth is uncer-
tain, but the period he assigns for it (Paradiso, XXII. 112-117)
extends from the middle of May to the middle of June. If we
understand Buti's astrological comment, the day should fall in
June rather than May.

DANTE 199

Convito, Dante himself was already aware when
writing the former and commenting it. Explain-
ing the sonnet beginning Gent II pensier, he says,
"In this sonnet I make two parts of myself ac-
cording as my thoughts were di\dded in two. The
one part I call heart, that is, the appetite, the
other soul, that is, reason. ... It is true that
in the preceding sonnet I take side with the heart
against the eyes [which were weeping for the lost
Beatrice], and that appears contrary to what I
say in the present one ; and therefore I say that
in that sonnet also I mean by my heart the appe-
tite, because my desire to remember me of my
most gentle Lady was still greater than to behold
this one, albeit I had already some appetite for
her, but slight as should seem : whence it ap-
pears that the one saying is not contrary to the
other." ^ When, therefore, Dante speaks of the
love of this Lady as the " adversary of Reason,^^
he uses the word in its highest sense, not as under-
standing (^Intellectmi), but as synonymous with
soul. Already, when the latter part of the Yita
JViiova, nay, perhaps the whole of the explanatory
portion of it, was written, the plan of the Corn-
media was complete, a poem the higher aim of
which was to keep the soul alive both in this world
and for the next. As Dante tells us, the contrar
diction in his mind was, though he did not become
aware of it till afterwards, more apparent than real.

^ Vita Nuova, XXXIX. Compare for a different view, The
New Life of Dante, an Essay with Translations, by C. E. Norton,
pp. 92 et seq.

200 DANTE

He sought consolation in stncly, and, failing to find
it in Learning (^scienza), he was led to seek it in
Wisdom (^sajjienza^^ which is the love of God and
the knowledge of him.^ He had sought haiij)iness
through the understanding ; he was to find it
through intuition. The lady Philosophy (accord-
ing as she is moral or intellectual) includes both.
Her gradual transfiguration is exemplified in pas-
sages already quoted. The active life leads indi-
rectly by a knowledge of its failures and sins (//i-
yer/io), or directly by a righteous employment of it

^ There is a passage in the Convito (Tr. III. c. 15) in which
Dante seems clearly to make the distinction asserted above, " And
therefore the desire of man is limited in this life to that knowledge
(scienzia) which may here he had, and passes not save by error
that point ■which is beyond our natural understanding. And so is
limited and measured in the angelic nature the amount of that
wisdom which the nature of each is capable of receiving." Man
is, according to Dante, superior to the angels in this, that he is
capable both of reason and contemplation, while they are confined
to the latter. That Beatrice's reproaches refer to no human par-
goletta, the context shows, where Dante asks,

" But wherefore so beyond my power of sight
Soars your desirable discourse, that aye
The more I strive, so much the more I lose it ?

' That thou mayst recognize,' she said, ' the school

Wliich thou hast followed, and mayst see how far
Its doctrine follows after my discourse.
And mayst behold your path from the divine
Distant as far as separated is

From earth the heaven that highest hastens on.' "
Purgatorio, XXXIII. 82-90.

Tlie pargoletta in its ordinary sense was necessary to the literal
and human meaning, but it is shockingly discordant with that
non-natural interpretation which, according to Dante's repeated
statement, lays open the true and di^-ine meaning.

DatUe

DANTE 201

(^Purgatono}, to the same end. The use of the
sciences is to induce in us the ultimate perfection,
that of speculating upon truth; the use of the
highest of them, theology, the contemplation of
God.^ To this they all lead up. In one of those
curious chapters of the Convito^ where he points
out the analogy between the sciences and the hear
vens, Dante tells us that he compares moral philoso-
phy \N'ith the crystalline heaven or Primum Mo-
bile, because it communicates life and gives motion
to all the others below it. But what gives motion
to the crystalline heaven (moral philosophy) itself ?
" The most fervent appetite which it has in each of
its parts to be conjoined with each part of that
most divine quiet heaven " (Theology) .^ Theol-
ogy, the divine science, corresponds vnth. the Em-
pyrean, " because of its peace, the which, through
the most excellent certainty of its subject, which is
God, suffers no strife of opinions or sophistic argu-
ments." * No one of the heavens is at rest but
this, and in none of the inferior sciences can we
find repose, though he likens physics to the heaven
of the fixed stars, in whose name is a suggestion of
the certitude to be arrived at in things demonstrable.
Dante had this comparison in mind, it may be in-
ferred, when he said,

1 " So then they that are in the flesh cannot please God. But
ye are not in the flesh, hut in the Spirit, if so be that the Spirit of
God dwell in you." (Romans viii. S, 9.)

2 Convito, Tr. II. c. 14, 15.

8 Convito, Tr. II. c. 4. Compare Paradise, I. 76, 77.
* " Vain babblings and oppositions of science falsely so called."
a Tim. vi. 20.)

202 DANTE

" Well I perceive that never sated is

Our intellect unless the Truth illume it
Beyond which nothing' true ^ expands itself.
It rests therein as wild Least in his lair,

Wlien it attains it ; and it can attain it ;
If not, then each desire would frustrate be.
Therefore springs up, in fashion of a shoot,

Doubt at the foot of truth ; and this is nature,
Which to the top from height to height impels us. " ^

The contradiction, as it seems to us, resolves itself
into an essential, easily apprehensible, if mystical,
unity. Dante at first gave himself to the study of
the sciences (after he had lost the simple, unques-
tioning faith of youth) as the means of arriving at
certainty. From the root of every truth to which
he attained sprang this sucker (I'cnnpollo) of doubt,
drawing out of it the very sap of its life. In this
way was Philosophy tridy an adversaiy of his soid,
and the reason of his remorse for fruitless studies
which drew him away from the one that alone was
and could be fruitful is obvious enough. But by
and by out of the very doubt came the sweetness ^
of a higher and truer insight. He became aware
that there were "things in heaven and earth un-
dreamt of in your philosophy," as another doubter
said, who had just finished Ms studies, but could
not find his way out of the scepticism they engen-
dered as Dante did.

" Insane is he who hopeth that our reason
Can traverse the illimitable way,
Which the one Substance in three Persons follows !

1 That is, no partial truth. "^ Paradiso, TV. 124-132.

^ '■ Out of the eater came forth meat, and out of the strong
came forth sweetness." (Judges xiv. 14.)

DANTE 203

Mortals, remain contented at the Quia ;

For if ye had been able to see all,

No need there were [had been] for Mary to give birth.
And ye have seen desiring without fruit

Those whose desire would have been quieted,

Which evermore is given them for a grief.
I speak of Aristotle and of Plato

And others many." ^

Whether at the time when the poems of the Yita
JVuova were written the Lady who withdrew him
for a while from Beatrice was (which we doubt)
a person of flesh and blood or not, she was no

^ Purgatorio, III. 34-44. The allusions in this passage are all
to sayings of Saint Paul, of whom Dante was plainly a loving
reader. " Remain contented at the Quia,^' that is, be satisfied
■with knowing that tilings are, without inquiring too nicely how or
why. " Being justified by faith we have peace with God " (Rom.
V. 1). Injinita via: "O the depth of the riches both of the
•wisdom and knowledge of God ! How unsearchable are his judg-
ments, and his ways past finding out ! " (Rom. xi. 33.) Aristotle
and Plato : " For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven
against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who hold the
truth in unrighteousness. . . . For the invisible things of him from
the creation of tlie world are clearly seen, being understood by
the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead, so
that they are without excuse. Because that when they knew God,
they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful, but became
vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened "
(Rom. i. lS-21). He refers to the Greeks. The Epistle to the
Romans, by the way, would naturally be Dante's favorite. As
Saint Paul made the Law, so he would make Science, " our
schoolmaster to bring us unto Christ, that we might be justified
by faith " (Gal. iii. 24). He puts Aristotle and Plato in his In-
ferno, because they did not " adore God duly " {Inferno, IV. 38),
that is, they " held the truth in unrighteousness.'' Yet he calls
Aristotle " the master and guide of human reason " (Convito, Tr.
IV. c. 6), and Plato "a most excellent man" (Convito, Tr. II.
c. 5). Plato and Aristotle, like all Dante's figures, are types. We
must disengage our thought from the individual, and fix it on the
genus.

204 DANTE

longer so when the prose narrative was composed.
Any one familiar with Dante's double meanings
will hardly question that by putting her at a win-
dow, which is a place to look out of, he intended
to imply that she personified Specidation, a word
which he uses with a wide range of meaning, some-
times as looking foi\ sometimes as seeing (like
Shakespeare's

*' There is no speculation in those eyes "),

sometimes as intuition, or the beholding all things
in God, who is the cause of all. This is so obvious,
and the image in this sense so familiar, that we are
surprised it should have been hitherto unremarked.
It is plain that, even when the Vita Nuova was
written, the Lady was already Philosophy, but
philosophy applied to a lower range of thought, not
yet ascended from flesh to spirit. The Lady who
seduced him was the science which looks for truth
in second causes, or even in effects, instead of seek-
ing it, where alone it can be found, in the First
Cause ; she was the Philosophy which looks for
happiness in the visible world (of shadows), and
not in the spiritual (and therefore substantial)
world. The guerdon of his search was doubt.
But Dante, as we have seen, made his very doubts
help him upward toward certainty ; each became a
round in the ladder by which he climbed to clearer
and clearer vision till the end.^ Philosophy had

^ It is to be remembered that Dante has typified the same thing
when he describes how Reason (Virgil) first carries him down by
clinging to the fell of Satan, and then in the same way upwards
again a riveder le stelle. Satan is the symbol of materialism, fixed
at the point

DANTE 205

made him forget Beatrice ; it was Philosophy who
was to bring him back to her again, washed clean
in that very stream of forgetfulness that had made
an impassable barrier between them.^ Dante had
known how to find in her the gift of Achilles's
lance,

" ^Vliich used to be the cause
First of a sad and then a gracious boon." ^

There is another possible, and even probable, the-
ory which would reconcile the Beatrice of the Pwr-
gatorio with her of the Vita jVuova. Suppose
that even in the latter she signified Theology, or at
least some influence that turned his thoughts to
God ? Pietro di Dante, commenting the pargoletta
passage in the Purgatorio, says expressly that the
poet had at one time given himself to the study of
theology and deserted it for poesy and other mun-
dane sciences. This must refer to a period begin-

" To which things heavy draw from every side " ;
33 God is Light and Warmth, so is he "cold obstruction"; the
very effort which he makes to rise by the motion of his wngs be-
gets the cliilly blast that freezes him more immovably in his place
of doom. The danger of all science save the highest (theology)
was that it led to materialism. There appears to have been a
great deal of it in Florence in the time of Dante. Its followers
called themselves Epicureans, and burn in living tombs (Inferno,
X.). Dante held them in special horror. " Of all bestialities that
is the most foolish and vile and hurtful which believes there is no
other life after this." " And I so believe, so affirm, and so am
certain that we pass to another better life after this" (Convito,
Tr. II. c. 9)- It is a fine divination of Carlyle from the Non han
speranza di morte that " one day it had risen sternly benign in the
scathed heart of Dante that he, wretched, never resting, worn as
he was, would [should] full surely Ji'e."

1 Purgatorio, XXXI. 103. 2 Jn/erno, XXXI. 5, 6.

206 DANTE

ning before 1290. Again, there is an early tra-
dition that Dante in his youth had been a novice
in a Franciscan convent, but never took the vows.
Buti affirms this expressly in his comment on In-
ferno, XVI. 106-123. It is perhaps slightly con-
firmed by what Dante says in the Convlto,^ that
"one can not only turn to Religion by making
himself like in habit and life to St. Benedict, St.
Augustine, St. Francis, and St. Dominic, but like-
wise one may turn to good and true religion in a
state of matrimony, for God wills no religion in us
but of the heart." If he had ever thought of tak-
ing monastic vows, his marriage would have cut
short any such intention. If he ever wished to wed
the real Beatrice Portinari, and was disappointed,
might not this be the time when his thoughts took
that direction ? If so, the impulse came indirectly,
at least, from her.

We have admitted that Beatrice Portinari was a
real creature,

" Col sangue suo e con le sue giunture " ;

but how real she was, and whether as real to the
poet's memory as to his imagination, may fairly be
questioned. She shifts, as the controlling emotion
or the poetic fitness of the moment dictates, from a
woman loved and lost to a gracious exhalation of
aU that is fairest in womanhood or most divine in
the soul of man, and ere the eye has defined the
new image it has become the old one again, or an-
other mingled of both.

1 Tr. IV. c. 28.

DANTE 207

" Nor one nor other seemed now what he was ;
E'en as proceedeth on before the flame

Upward along the paper a brown color,

Which is not black as yet, and the white dies." *

As the mystic Griffin in the eyes of Beatrice (her
demonstrations), so she in his own,

" Now with the one, now wdth the other nature ;
TMnk, Reader, if within myself I marvelled
^^^leu I beheld the thing- itself stand still
And in its image it transformed itself.""^

At the very moment when she had undergone her
most sublimated allegorical evaporation, his in-
stinct as poet, which never failed him, realized her
into woman again in those scenes of almost un-
approached pathos which make the climax of his
Purfjatorlo. The verses tremble with feeling and
shine with tears.^ Beatrice recalls her own beauty

1 Inferno, XXV. G4-G7. 2 Purgatorio, XXXI. 123-126.

' Spenser, who had, like Dante, a Platonizing side, and who was
probably the first English poet since Chaucer that had read the
Commedia, has imitated the pictorial part of these passages in the
Faerie Queene (B. VI. c. 10). He has turned it into a com-
pliment, and a very beautiful one, to a living mistress. It is in-
structive to compare the effect of his purely sensuous verses with
that of Dante's, which have such a wonderful reach behind them.
They are singularly pleasing, but they do not stay by us as those
of his model had done by him. Spenser was, as Slilton called
him, a "sage and serious poet " ; he would be the last to take
offence if we draw from him a moral not without its use now that
Priapus is trying to persuade us that pose and drapery will make
him as good as Urania. Better far the naked nastiness ; the
more covert the indecency, the more it shocks. Poor old god of
gardens ! Innocent as a clownish symbol, he is simply disgusting
as an ideal of art. In the last century, tliey set him up in Ger-
many and in France as befitting an era of enlightenment, the light
of which came too manifestly from the wrong quarter to be long
endurable.

208 DANTE

with a pride as natural as that of Fair Annie in
the okl ballad, and compares herself as advanta-
geously with the " brown, brown bride " who had
supplanted her. If this be a ghost, we do not need
be told that she is a woman still.^ We must re-
member, however, that Beatrice had to be real that
she might be interesting, to be beautiful that her
goodness might be persuasive, nay, to be beautiful
at any rate, because beauty has also something in

^ This touch of natnre recalls another. The Italians claim hu-
mor for Dante. We have never been able to find it, unless it be
in that passage {Inferno, XV. 110) where Brunetto Latiui lingers
under the burning shower to recommend his Tesoro to his former
piipU. There is a comical touch of nature in an author's solici-
tude for his little work, not, as in Fielding's case, after its, but
his own damnation. We are not sure, but we fancy we catch the
momentary flicker of a smile across those serious eyes of Dante's.
There is something like humor in the opening verses of the XVI.
Paradiso, where Dante tells us how even in heaven he could not
help glorying in being gently bom, — he who had devoted a Can-
zone and a book of the Convito to proving that nobility consisted
■wholly in virtue. But there is, after all, something touchingly
natural in the feeling. Dante, unjustly robbed of his property,
and with it of the independence so dear to him, seeing
" Needy nothings trimmed in jollity,
And captive Good attending Captain 111,"

would naturally fall back on a distinction which money could
neither buy nor replace. There is a curious passage in the Con-
vito which shows how bitteriy he resented his undeserved poverty.
He tells us that buried treasure commonly revealed itseK to the
bad rather than the good. " Verily I saw the place on the flanks
of a mountain in Tuscany called Falterona, where the basest pea-
sant of the whole countryside digging found there more than a
bushel of pieces of the finest silver, which perhaps had awaited
him more than a thousand years." (Tr. IV. c. 11.) One can see
the griraness of his face as he looked and thought, "how salt a
savor hath the bread of others ! "

DANTE 209

it of divine. Dante has toltl, in a passage already
quoted, that he would rather his readers shoiUd
find his doctrine sweet than his verses, but he had
his releutings from this Stoicism.

" Canzone, I believe those will be rare
W'bo of thine inner sense can master all,
Such toil it costs thy native ton|^e to leam ;
Wherefore, if ever it percliance befall
That thou in presence of such men shouldst fare
As seem not skilled thy meaning to discern,
I pray thee then tliy grief to comfort turn,
Saying to them, ' 0 thou my new delight,
Take heed at least how fair I am to sight.' " ^

We believe all Dante's other Ladies to have been
as purely imaginarv as the Dulcinea of Don Qui-
xote, useful only as motives, but a real Beatrice is
as essential to the human sympathies of the Divina
Comnxedia as her glorified Idea to its allegorical
teaching, and this Dante understood j^erfectly well.^
Take her out of the poem, and the heart of it goes
with her ; take out her ideal, and it is emptied of
its soul. She is the menstruum in which letter
and spirit dissolve and mingle into unity. Those
who doubt her existence must find Dante's gi-aceful
sonnet ^ to Guido Cavalcanti as provoking as San-
cho's story of his having seen Dulcinea winnowing
wheat was to his master, " so alien is it from all

^ L'Envoi of Canzone XIV. of the Canzoniere. I. of the Convito.
Dante cites the first verse of this Canzone, Paradiso, VIII. 37.

^ How Dante himself could allegorize even historical person-
ages may be seen in a curious passage of the Convito (Tr. IV. c.
28), where, commenting on a passage of Lucan, he treats Martia
and Cato as mere figures of speech.

^ II. of the Canzoniere. See Fraticelli's preface.

210 DANTE

that which eminent persons, who are constituted
antl preserved for other exercises and entertain-
ments, do and ought to do." * But we should al-
ways remember in reading Dante that with him the
allegorical interpretation is the true one (yerace
sposizione'), and that he represents himself (and
that at a time when he was known to the world
only by his minor poems) as having made right-
eousness (rettltuclhie, in other words, moral philos-
ophy) the subject of his verse.^ Love with him
seems first to have meant the love of truth and the
search after it (^speculuzlone) , and afterwards the
contemplation of it in its infinite source (^specula-
zione in its higher and mystical sense.) This is
the divine love " which where it shines darkens and
wellnigh extinguishes all other loves." ^ Wisdom

1 Don Quixote, P. II. e. viii.

2 De Vulgari Eloquio, 1. ii. c. 2. He says the same of Giraud
de Borneil, many of whose poems are moral and even devotional.
See, particularly, ' ' Al honor Dieu torn en raon chan " (Ray-
nouard. Lex Bom. I. 388), "Ben es dregz pos en aital port" (lb.
303), " Jois sia comensamens" (lb. .395), and "Be Teg e conosc e
say " (lb. .398). Another of his poems (" Ar ai grant joy," Ray-
nonard, Choix, III. 304), may possibli/ be a mystical profession of
love for the Blessed Virgin, for whom, as Dante tells us, Beatrice
had a special devotion.

^ Convito, Tr. III. c 14. In the same chapter is perhaps an
explanation of the two rather difficult verses which follow that
in which the veracc speglio is spoken of (Paradiso, XXVI. 107,
108).

" Che fa di s^ pareglie 1' altre cose
E nxdla face lui di s^ pareglio."
Buti's comment is, " that is, makes of itself a receptacle to other
things, that is, to all things that exist, which are all seen in it."
Dante says (ubi supra), " The descending of the virtue of one
thing into another is a reducing that other into a likeness of itself.

DANTE 211

is the object of it, and the end of wisdom to con-
template God the true mirror (yerace sji&glio^ spec-
%dum)^ wherein all things are seen as they truly
are. Xay, she herself " is the brightness of the
eternal light, the unspotted mirror of the majesty
of God." 1

. . . Whence we see tliat the sun sending his ray do-wn hither-
vard reduces things to a likeness with his light in so far as they
are able by their disposition to receive light from his power. So
I say that God reduces this love to a likeness with himself as
much as it is possible for it to be like him." In Provencal pareilh
means like, and Dante may have formed his word from it. But
the four earliest printed texts read : —

'■ Che fa di s6 pareglio all' altre cose."
Accordingly we are inclined to think that the next verse should be
corrected thus : —

" E nulla face a lui di s^ pareglio."
We would form pareglio from jjarere (a something in which things
appear), as miraglio from mirare (a something in which they are
seen). God contains all things in himself, but nothing can wholly
contain him. The blessed behold all things in liim as if reflected,
but not one of the things so reflected is capable of his image in
its completeness. This interpretation is conflrmed by Paradiso,
XIX. 49-.51.

" E quinci appar cA' ogni minor natura
E corto recettacolo a quel bene

Che nan ha fine, e s^ con s.h misnra."

1 Wisdom of Solomon, vii. 26, quoted by Dante (Convito, Tr.
m. c. 1-5). There are other passages in the Wisdom of Solomon
besides that just cited which we may well believe Dante to have
had in his mind when writing the Canzone, beginning, —

" Amor che nella mente mi ragiona,"
and the commentary upon it, and some to which his experience of
life must have given an intenser meaning. The writer of that
book also personifies Wisdom as the mistress of his soul: "I
loved her and sought her out from my yonth, I desired to make
her my spouse, and I was a lover of her beauty." He says of

212 DANTE

There are two beautiful passages in the Convito^
which we shall quote, both because they have, as
we believe, a close application to Dante's own ex-
perience, and because they are good specimens of

Wisdom that she -was "present when thou (God) madest the
world," and Dante in the same way identifies lier with the divine
Logos, citing as authority tlie " beginning of the Gospel of John."
He tells us, "I perceived that I could not otherwise obtain her
except God gave her me," and Dante came at last to the same
conclusion. Again, " For the very true beginning of her is the
desire of discipline ; and the care of discipline is love. And love
is the keeping of her laws ; and the giving heed unto her laws is
the assurance of incorruption." But who can doubt that he read
with a bitter exultation, and applied to himself passages like
these which follow ? " When the righteous fled from his brother'' s
ivrath, she guided him in right paths, showed him the kingdom of
God, and gave him knowledge of holy things. She defended him
from his enemies and kept him safe from those that laj" in wait,
. . . that he might know that godliness is stronger than all. . . .
She forsook him not, but delivered him from sin ; she went down
with him into the pit, and left him not in bonds till she brought him
the sceptre of the kingdom, . . . and gave him perpetual glory."
It was, perhaps, from this book that Dante got the hint of making
his punishments and penances typical of the sins that earned
them. " Wherefore, whereas men lived dissolutely and unright-
eously, thou hast tormented them with their own abominations."
Dante was intimate with the Scriptures. They do even a scholar
no harm. M. Victor Le Clerc, in his Histoire Litth-aire de la
France au quatorzieme siecle (torn. ii. p. 72), thinks it " not impos-
sible " that a passage in the Lamentations of Jeremiah, para-
phrased by Dante, may have been suggested to him by Rutebeuf
or Tristan, rather than by the prophet himself ! Dante would
hardly have found himself so much at home in the company of
longleurs as in that of prophets. Yet he was familiar with
French and Provengal poetry. Beside the evidence of the Vulgari
Eloquio, there are frequent and broad traces in the Commedia of
the Roman de la Rose, slighter ones of the Chevalier de la Cha-
rette, Guillaume d'Orange, and a direct imitation of Bernard de
Ventadour.

DANTE 213

his style as a WTiter of prose. In the manly sim-
plicity which comes of an earnest purpose, and in
the eloquence of deep conviction, this is as far be-
yond tliat of any of his contemporaries as his verse ;
nay, more, has hardly been matched by any Italian
fi'om that day to this. Illustrating- the position
that "the highest desire of everything and the
first given us by nature is to return to its first
cause," he says : " And since God is the beginning
of our souls and the maker of them like unto him-
self, according as was written, ' Let us make man
in our image and likeness,' this soul most greatly
desires to return to him. And as a j^ilgrim who
goes by a way he has never travelled, who believes
every house he sees afar off to be his inn, and not
finding it to be so directs his belief to another, and
so from house to house till he come to the inn, so
our soul forthwith on entering upon the new and
never-travelled road of this life directs its eyes to
the goal of its highest good, and therefore believes
whatever thing it sees that seems to have in it any
good to be that. And because its first knowledge
is imperfect by reason of not being experienced
nor indoctrinated, small goods seem to it great.
A\ herefore we see children desire most greatly an
apple, and then proceeding further on desire a
bird, and then further yet desire fine raiment, and
then a horse, and then a woman, and then riches
not great, and then greater and greater. And this
befalls because in none of these things it finds that
which it goes seeking, and thinks to find it further
on. By which it may be seen that one desirable

214 DANTE

stands before another in the eyes of our soul in
a fashion as it were pyramidal, for the smallest at
first covers the whole of them, and is as it were
the apex of the highest desirable, which is God,
as it were the base of all ; so that the further we
go from the aj)ex toward the base the desirables
appear greater ; and this is the reason why human
desires become wider one after the other. Verily
this way is lost through error as the roads of earth
are ; for as from one city to another there is of
necessity one best and straightest way, and one
that always leads farther from it, that is, the one
which goes elsewhere, and many others, some less
roundabout and some less direct, so in human life
are divers roads whereof one is the truest and an-
other the most deceitful, and certain ones less de-
ceitful, and certain less true. And as we see that
that which goes most directly to the city fulfils
desire and gives repose after weariness, and that
which goes the other way never fulfils it and never
can give repose, so it falls out in our life. The
good traveller arrives at the goal and repose, the
erroneous never arrives thither, but with much
weariness of mind, always with greedy eyes looks
before him." ^ If we may apply Dante's own
method of exposition to this passage, we find him
telling us that he first sought felicity in knowledge,

" That apple sweet which through so many branches
The care of mortals goeth in pursuit of,"' -

then in fame, a bird that flits before us as we fol-

1 Convito, Tr. I. c 12.

2 Purgatorio, XXII. 115, 116.

DASTE 215

low,^ then in being esteemed of men (" to be
clothed in pur])le, ... to sit next to Darius, . . .
and be called Darius his cousin "), then in power,^
then in the riches of the Holy Spirit in larger and
larger measure.^ He, too, had found that there
was but one straight road, whether to the Terres-
ti'ial Paradise or the Celestial City, and may come
to question by and by whether they be not parallel
one with the other, or even parts of the same road,
by which only repose is to be reached at last.
Then, when in old age '' the noble soul returns to
God as to that port whence she set forth on the sea
of this life, . . . just as to him who comes from a
long journey, before he enters into the gate of his
cit}', the citizens thereof go forth to meet him, so
the citizens of the eternal life go to meet her^ and
do so because of her good deeds and contempla-
tions, who, having already betaken herself to God,

^ That Dante loved fame we need not be told. He several
times confesses it, especially in the De Vulgari Eloquio, I. 17.
"How glorious she [the Vulgar Tongne] makes her intimates \J'a-
tniliares, those of her household], we ourselves have known, who
in the sweetness of this glory put our esdle behind our backs."

2 Dante several times uses the sitting a horse as an image of
rule. See especially Purgatorio, VI. 99, and Convito, Tr. IV.
ell.

* " O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and the know-
ledge of God ! " Dante quotes this in speaking of the influence of
the stars, which, interpreting it presently ''by the theological
way," he compares to that of the Holy Spirit. "And thy coun-
sel who hath known, except thou give wisdom and send thy Holy
Spirit from above?" (Wisdom of .Solomon, ix. IT.) The last
words of the Convito are. " her [Philosophy] whose proper dwell-
ing is in the depths of the Divine mind." The ordinary reading
is ragione (reason), but it seems to us an obvious blunder for ma-
gione (mansion, dwelling).

216 DANTE

seems to see those whom she beKeves to be nigh
unto God." ^ This also was to be the experience
of Dante, for who can doubt that the Paradiso
was something very unlike a poetical exercise to hira
who appeals to the visions even of sleep as proof of
the soid's immortality?

When did his soul catch a glimpse of that cer-
tainty in which " the mind that museth upon many
things " can find assured rest ? We have already
said that we believe Dante's political opinions to
have taken their final shape and the De Monarclda
to have been written before 1300.^ That the revi-
sion of the Vita Nuova was completed in that year
seems probable from the last sonnet but one, which
is addressed to pilgrims on their way to the Santa
Veronica at Rome.^ In this sonnet he still laments

1 Convito, Tr. IV. c. 28.

2 He refers to a change in his own opinions (lib. ii. § 1), where
he says, "When I knew the nations to have murmured against
the preeminence of the Roman people, and saw the people imag-
ining vain things as I myself was wont.'''' He was a Guelph by in-
heritance, he became a Ghibelline by conviction.

^ It should seem from Dante's words ( " at the time when much
people went to see the blessed image," and " ye seem to come
from a far-off people " ) that this was some extraordinary occa-
sion, and what so likely as the jubilee of loOO ? (Compare Para-
diso, XXXI. 103-lOS.) Dante's comparisons are so constantly
drawn from actual eyesight, that his allusion (Inferno, XIII. 28-
o3) to a device of Boniface VIII. for passing the crowds quietly
across the bridge of Saint Aiigelo, renders it not unlikely that he
was in Rome at that time, and perhaps conceived his poem there
as Giovanni Villani his chronicle. That Rome would deeply stir
his mind and heart is beyond question. " And certes I am of a
firm opinion that the stones that stand in her walls are worthy of
reverence, and the soil where she sits worthy beyond what is
preached and admitted of men." {Convito, Tr. IV. c 5.)

DANTE 217

Beatrice as dead ; he would make the pilgrims
share his grief. It is the very folly of despairing
sorrow, that calls on the first comer, stranger
though he be, for a sympathy which none can fully
give, and he least of all. But in the next sonnet,
the hist in the book, there is a surprising change of
tone. The transfiguration of Beatrice has begun,
and we see completing itseK that natural gradation
of grief which will erelong bring the mourner to
call on the departed saint to console him for her
own loss. The sonnet is remarkable in more senses
than one, fu'st for its psychological truth, and then
still more for the light it throws on Dante's inward
history as poet and thinker. Hitherto he had cele-
brated beauty and goodness in the creature ; hence-
forth he was to celebrate them in the Creator whose
praise they were.^ We give an extempore transla-
tion of this sonnet, in wliich the meaning is pre-
served so far as is possible where the gi-ace is left
out. AVe remember with some compunction as we
do it, that Dante has said, " know every one that

1 Beatrice, loda di Dio vera, Inferno, II. 103. " Surely vain are
all men by nature who are ignorant of God, and could not out of
the good things that are seen know him that is, neither by con-
sidering the works did they acknowledge the work-master. . . .
For, being conversant in his works, they search diligently and be-
lieve their sight, because the things are beautiful that are seen.
Howbeit, neither are they to be pardoned." (Wisdom of Solomon,
xiii. 1, 7, 8.) Non adorar debitamente Dio. "For the in%'isible
things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, be-
ing understood by the things that are made, even his eternal
power and godhead ; so that they are Avithout excuse. " It was
these '"invisible things" whereof Dante was beginning to get a
glimpse.

218 DANTE

nothing harmonized by a musical band can be
transmuted from its own speech to another without
breaking all its sweetness and harmony," ^ and
Cervantes was of the same mind : ^ —

" Beyond the sphere that hath the widest gyre
Passeth the sigh ^ that leaves my heart below ;
A new intelligence doth love bestow
On it with tears that ever draws it higher ;
When it wins thither where is its desire,
A Lady it beholds who honor so
And light receives, that, through her splendid glow,
The pilgrim spirit * sees her as in fire ;
It sees her such, that, telling me again
I understand it not, it speaks so low
Unto the mourning heart that bids it tell ;
Its speech is of that noble One I know,
For ' Beatrice ' I often hear f idl plain,
So that, dear ladies, I conceive it well."

No one can read this in its connection with what
goes before and what follows without feeling that
a new conception of Beatrice had dawned upon the
mind of Dante, dim as yet, or purposely made to
seem so, and yet the authentic forerunner of the
fulness of her rising as the light of his day and the

' Convito, Tr. I. c. 7.

^ ' ' And here we would have forgiven Mr. Captain if he had not
betrayed him (traido, traduttore, traditore) to Spain and made
him a Castilian, for he took away much of his native worth, and
so will all those do who shall undertake to turn a poem into an-
other tongue ; for with all the care they take and ability they
show, they will never reach the height of its original conception,"
says the Curate, speaking of a translation of Ariosto. (Don
Quixote, P. I. c. 6.)

^ In his own comment Dante says, " I tell whither goes my
thought, calling it by the name of one of its effects."

* Spirito means in Italian both breath (spirto ed acqua Jessi,
Purgatorio, XXX. 98) and spirit.

DANTE 219

guide of his feet, the di\ane wisdom whose glory
pales all meaner stars. The conception of a poem
in which Dante's creed in politics and morals shoidd
be picturesquely and attractively embodied, and of
the high place which Beatrice should take in it,
had begiin vaguely to shape itself in his thought.
As he brooded over it, of a sudden it defined itself
clearly. " Soon after this sonnet there appeared
to me a marvellous vision ^ wherein I saw things
which made me propose not to say more of that
blessed one until I could treat of her more wor-
thily. And to arrive at that I study all I can, as
she verily knows. So that, if it be the pleasure of
Him through whom all tilings live, that my life
hold out yet a few years, I hoj^e to say that of her
which was never yet said of any (woman). And
then may it please Him who is the Lord of Cour-
tesy that my soul may go to see the glory of her
Lady, that is, of that blessed Beatrice who gloriously
beholds the face of Him qui est per omnia scecula
henedictus.'''' It was the method of presentation
that became clear to Dante at this time, — the plan
of the great poem for whose completion the expe-
rience of earth and the inspiration of heaven were
to combine, and which was to make him lean for
many years.^ The doctrinal scope of it was already
determined. Man, he tells us, is the only creature
who partakes at once of the corruptible and incor-

^ By visione Dante means something seen waking by the inner
eye. He believed also that dreams -were sometimes divinely in-
spired, and argues from sucli the immortality of the souL ( Con-
vito, Tr. II. c. 0. )

2 Paradiso, XXV. 1-3.

220 DANTE

ruptible nature ; " and since every nature is or-
dained to some ultimate end, it follows that the end
of man is douLle. And as among all beings he
alone partakes of the corruptible and incorrupti-
ble, so alone among all beings he is ordained to a
double end, whereof the one is his end as corrupti-
ble, the other as incorruptible. That unspeakable
Providence therefore foreordered two ends to be
pursued by man, to wit, beatitude in this life,
which consists in the operation of our own virtue,
and is figured by the Terrestrial Paradise, and the
beatitude of life eternal, which consists in a frui-
tion of the divine countenance, whereto our own
virtue cannot ascend unless aided by divine light,
which is understood by the Celestial Paradise."
The one we attain by practice of the moral and
intellectual virtues as they are taught by philoso-
phers, the other by spiritual teachings transcending
human reason, and the practice of the theological
virtues of Faith, Hope, and Charity. For one.
Reason suffices (" which was wholly made known
to us by philosophers "), for the other we need the
light of supernatural truth revealed by the Holy
Spirit and " needful for us." ]\Ien led astray by
cupidity turn their backs on both, and in their bes-
tiality need bit and rein to keep them in the way.
" Wherefore to man was a double guidance needful
according to the double end," the Supreme Pontiff
in spiritual, the Emperor in temporal things.^

^ De Monarchia, lib. iii. § nit. See the whole passage in MLss
Rossetti, p. 31'. It is noticeable that Dante says that the Pope is
to lead (by example), the Emperor to direct (by the enforcinjj of

DANTE 2-21

But how to put this theory of his into a poetic
form which might charm while it was teaching?
He woukl typify Reason in Virgil (who would
serve also as a symbol of political wisdom as hav-
ing celebrated the foimding of the Empire), and
the grace of God in that Beatrice whom he had
already supernatxu-alized into something which pass-
eth all understandino". In choosins: Virgil he was
sure of that interest and sympathy which his in-
stinct led him to seek in the predisposition of his
readers, for the popular imagination of the Middle
Ages had busied itself particidarly with the Man-
tuan poet. The Church had given him a quasi-
ortliodoxy by interpreting hi^ jam redit et virgo as
a prophecy of the birth of Clirist. At Naples he
had become a kind of patron saint, and his bones
were exhibited as relics. Dante himself may have
heard at Mantua the hymn simg on the anniversary
of St. Paid, in which the apostle to the Gentiles is
represented as weeping at the tomb of the greatest
of jjoets. Above all, Virgil had described the de-
scent of ^neas to the under-world. Dante's choice
of a guide was therefore, in a certain degree, made
for him. But the mere Reason ^ of man without

justice). The duty, we are to observe, was a double but not a di-
vided one. To exemplify this unity was indeed one object of the
Commedia.

^ " \^^lat Reason seeth here

Myself [Virgil] can tell thee ; beyond that await

For Beatrice, since 'tis a work of Faith."

(Purgatorio, XVIII. 46-48.)
Beatrice here evidently impersonates Theology. It would be in-
teresting to know what was the precise date of Dante's theological
studies. The earlier commentators all make him go to Paris, the

222 DANTE

the illumination of divine Grace cannot be trusted,
and accordingly the intervention of Beatrice was
needed, — of Beatrice, as Miss Rossetti admirably
well expresses it, " already transfigured, potent not
only now to charm and soothe, potent to rule ; to
the Intellect a light, to the Affections a compass
and a balance, a scejjtre over the Will."

The wood obscure in which Dante finds himself
is the world. ^ The three beasts who dispute his
way are the sins that most easily beset us. Pride,
the Lusts of the Flesh, and Greed. We are sur-
prised that Miss Rossetti should so localize and
confine Dante's meaning as to explain them by
Florence, France, and Rome. Had he written in
so narrow a sense as this, it woidd indeed be hard
to account for the persistent power of his poem.

great fountain of such learning, after his banishment. Boccaccio
indeed says that he did not return to Italy till loll. Wegele
(Dante's Leben unci Werhe, p. 85) puts the date of his journey be-
tween 1292 and 1297. Ozanam, with a pathos comically touching
to the academic soul, laments that poverty compelled him to leave
the university without the degree he had so justly earned. He
consoles himself with the thought that " there remained to him
an incontestable erudition and the love of serious studies." (Dante
et la philosophic catholique, p. 112.) It is sad that we cannot write
Dantes Alighierius, S. T. D. ! Dante seems to imply that he be-
gan to devote himself to Philosophy and Theology short;ly after
Beatrice's death. (Convito, Tr. II. c. 13.) He compares himself
to one who, "seeking silver, should, without meaning it, find
gold, which an occult cause presents to him, not perhaps without
the divine command." Here again apparently is an allusion to
his having found Wisdom while he sought Learning. He had
thought to find God in the beauty of his works, he learned to seek
all things in God.

^ In a more general view, matter, the domain of the senses, no
doubt with a recollection of Aristotle's uAtj.

DANTE 223

But it was no political pamphlet that Dante was
writing. Suhjectum est IlumOj and it only takes
the form of a diary by Dante Alighieri because of
the intense realism of his imagination, a realism as
striking in the T*aradiiiO as the Inferno, though
it takes a different shape. Everything, the most
supersensual, })resented itself to his mind, not as
abstract idea, but as visible type. As men could
once embody a quality of good in a saint and see
it, as they even now in moments of heightened
fantasy or enthusiasm can personify their country
and speak of England, France, or America, as if
they were real beings, so did Dante habitually.^
He saw all his thoughts as distinctly as the hypo-
chondriac sees his black dog, and, as in that, their
form and color were but the outward form of an in-
ward and spiritual condition. Whatever subsidiary
interpretations the poem is capable of, its great
and primary value is as the autobiography of a
human soul, of yours and mine, it may be, as well
as Dante's. In that lie its profound meaning and
its permanent force. That an exile, a proud man
forced to be dependent, should have found some
consolation in brooding over the justice of God,
weighed in such different scales from those of man,
in contrasting the outward prosperity of the sinner
with the awful spiritual ruin within, is not wonder-
ful, nay, we can conceive of his sometimes finding
the wrath of God sweeter than his mercy. But it

^ As we have seen, even a sigh becomes He. This makes one of
the difficulties of translating his minor poems. The modern mind
is incapable of this subtlety.

224 DANTE

is wonderful that out of the very wreck of his own
life he should have built this three-arched bridge,
still firm against the wash and wear of ages,
stretching from the Pit to the Empyrean, by which
men may pass from a doubt of God's providence to
a certainty of his long-suffering and loving-kind-
ness.

" The Infinite Goodness hath such ample arms
That it receives whatever turns to it." ^

A tear is enough to secure the saving clasp of
them.^ It cannot be too often repeated that Dante's
Other World is not in its first conception a place
of departed spirits. It is the Spiritual World,
whereof we become denizens by birth and citizens
by adoption. It is true that for artistic purposes
he makes it conform so far as possible with vulgar
preconceptions, but he himself has told us again
and again what his real meaning was. Virgil tells
Dante, —

" Thou shalt behold the people dolorous
Who have foregone the good of intellect." ^

The " good of the intellect," Dante tells us after
Aristotle, is Truth.'* He says that Virgil has led
him "through the deep night of the tridy dead" ^
Who are they ? Dante had in mind the saying of
the Apostle, "to be carnally minded is death."
He says : " In man to live is to use reason. Then
if living is the being of man, to depart from that
use is to depart from being, and so to be dead.

1 Purgatorio, III. 122, 123.

2 Furgatorio, V. 107.

^ Inferno, III. 17, 18 {hanno perduto = thrown away).

* Vonvito. Tr. II. c. 14.

6 Purgatorio, XXIII. 121, 122.

DANTE 225

And doth not he depart from the use of reason
who doth not reason out the object of his life ? "
" I say that so vile a person is dead, seeming to be
alive. For we must know that the iviched man may
he called tridy dead.'" '* lie is dead who follows
not the teacher. And of such a one some might say,
how is he dead and yet goes about ? I answer that
the man is dead and the beast remains." ^ Ac-
cordingly he has put livir j^ persons in the Inferno^
like Frate Alberigo and Branca d' Oria, of w'hom
he says with bitter sarcasm that he still " eats and
drinks and puts on clothes," as if that were his
highest ideal of the true ends of life.^ There is a
passage in the first canto of the Inferno ^ which
has been variously interpreted : —

" The ancient spirits disconsolate •

Who cry out each one for the second death."

Miss Rossetti cites it as an example of what she
felicitously calls " an ambiguity, not hazy, but pris-
matic, and therefore not really perplexing." She
gives us accordingly our choice of two interpreta-
tions : " ' Each cries out on account of the second
death which he is suffering,' and 'Each cries out
for death to come a second time and ease him of
his sufferings.' " ^ Buti says : " Here one doubts
what the author meant by the second death, and as
for me I think he meant the last damnation, which

1 Convito, Tr. IV. c. 7.

2 Inferno, XXXIII. 118, et seq.
8 Inferno, I. 11 G, 117.

* Mr. Long^f ellow's for, like the Italian per, gives us the same
privilege of election. We " freeze for cold," we " hunger for
food."

226 DANTE

shall be at the clay of judgTiient, because they
would wish through envy that it had already come,
that they uiight have more companions, since the
first death is the first damnation, when the soul
parted from the body is condemned to the pains of
hell for its sins. The second is when, resuscitated
at the judgment day, they shall be finally con-
demned, soul and body together. ... It may
otherwise be understood as annihilation." Imola
says, " Each would wish to die again, if he could,
to put an end to his pain. Do not hold with some
who think that Dante calls the second death the
day of judgment,'^ and then quotes a passage from
St. Augustine which favors that view. Pietro di
Dante gives us four interpretations among which
to choose, the first being that, " allegorically, de-
praved and \acious men are in a certain sense dead
in reputation, and tliis is the first death ; the sec-
ond is that of the body." This we believe to be
the true meaning. Dante himself, in a letter to
the " most rascally (^scelestissimis^ dwellers in
Florence," gives us the key : " but you, transgres-
sors of the laws of God and man, whom the dire-
ful maw of cupidity hath enticed not unwilling to
every crime, does not the terror of the second death
torment you ? " Their first death was in their sins,
the second is what they may expect from the just
vengeance of the Emperor Henry VII, The world
Dante leads us through is that of his own thought,
and it need not surprise us therefore if we meet in
it purely imaginary beings like Tristrem ^ and Re-
1 Inferno, V. G7.

DANTE 227

noard of the club.* His personality is so strongly
marked that it is nothing more than natural that
his poem should be interpreted as if only he and
his opinions, prejudices, or passions were concerned.
He would not have been the great poet he was if
he had not felt intensely and humanly, but he
could never have won the cosmopolitan place he
holds had he not known how to generalize his spe-
cial experience into something mediatorial for all of
us. Pietro di Dante in his comment on the thirty-
fii'st canto of the Purgatorio says that " unless you
understand him and his figures allegorically, you
will be deceived by the bark," and adds that our
author made his pilgrimage as the representative
of the rest (^in persona ceteroriirti) P- To give his
vision reality, he has adapted it to the vulgar my-
thology-, but to understand it as the author meant,
it must be taken in the larger sense. To confine

^ Paradiso, X\^II. 46. Renoard is one of the heroes (a rudely
humorous one) in La Bataille d'' Alischnns, an episode of the
measureless Guillaume d' Orange. It was from the graves of those
supposed to have been killed in this battle that Dante draws a
comparison, Inferno. IX. Boccaccio's comment on this passage
might have been read to advantage by the French editors of Ali-
schans.

- We cite this comment under its received name, though it is
uncertain if Pietro was the author of it. Indeed, we strongly
doubt it. It is at least one of the earliest, for it appears, by the
comment on Paradiso, XXVI., that the greater part of it was
written before 1341. It is remarkable for the strictness with
which it holds to the spiritual interpretation of the poem, and de-
serves much more to be called Ottimo, than the comment which
goes by that name. Its publication is due to the zeal and liberal-
ity of the late Lord Vernon, to whom students of Dante are also
indebted for the parallel-text reprint of the four earliest editions
of the Commedia.

228 DANTE

it to Florence or to Italy is to banish it from th^
sympathies of mankind. It was not from the cam-
panile of the Badia that Dante got his views of life
and man.

The relation of Dante to literature is monumen-
tal, and marks the era at which the modern begins.
He is not only the first great poet, but the first
great prose writer who used a language not yet sub-
dued to literature, who used it moreover for scien-
tific and metaphysical discussion, thus giving an
incalculable impulse to the culture of his country-
men by making the laity free of what had hitherto
been the exclusive guild of clerks.^ Whatever
poetry had preceded him, whether in the Romance
or Teutonic tongues, is interesting mainly for its
simplicity without forethought, or, as in the Nibe-
lungen^ for a kind of savage grandeur that rouses
the sympathy of whatever of the natural man is
dormant in us. But it shows no trace of the crea-
tive faculty either in unity of purpose or style, the
proper characteristics of literature. If it have the
charm of wanting artifice, it has not the higher
charm of art. We are in the realm of chaos and
chance, nebular, with phosphorescent gleams here
and there, star-stuff, but uncondensed in stars.

^ See Wegele, ubi supra, p. 174, et seq. The best analysis of
Dante's opinions we have ever met with is Emil Ruth's Studien
liber Dante Alighieri, Tiibingen, 1853. Unhappily it wants an
index, and accordingly loses a great part of its usefulness for those
not already familiar witli the subject. Nor are its references suf-
ficiently exact. We always respect Dr. Rutli's opinions, if we do
not wholly accept them, for they are all the results of original and
assiduous study.

DANTE 229

The Nihelungen is not without far-reachinj:^ hints
and forebodings of something finer than we find in
it, but they are a ghiniour from the vague darkness
which encircles it, hke the whisper of the sea upon
an unknown shore at night, powerful only over the
more vulgar side of the imagination, and leaving
no thought, scarce even any image (at least of
beaut}'^) behind them. Such poems are the amours,
not the lasting friendships and possessions of the
mind. They thrill and cannot satisfy.

But Dante is not merely the founder of modern
literature. He would have been that if he had
never written anything more than his Canzoni,
which for elegance, variety of rhythm, and fervor
of sentiment were something altogether new. They
are of a higher mood than any other poems of the
same style in their own language, or indeed in any
other. In beauty of phrase and subtlety of analogy
they remind one of some of the Greek tragic cho-
ruses. We are constantly moved in them by a
nobleness of tone, whose absence in many admired
lyrics of the kind is poorly supplied by conceits.
So perfect is Dante's mastery of his material, that
in compositions, as he himself has shown, so arti-
ficial,^ the form seems rather organic than mechan-

^ See the second book of the De Vulgari Eloquio. The only
other Italian poet who reminds us of Dante in sustained dignity
is Guido GuiniceUi. Dante esteemed him highly, calls him max-
imus in the De Vulgari Elo'juio, and " the father of me and of my
betters," in the XXVI. Purgatorio. See some excellent specimens
of him in Mr. D. G. Rossetti's remarkable volume of translations
from the early Italian poets. Mr. Rossetti would do a real and
la.sting service to literature by employing his singular g^t in put-
ting Dante's minor poems into English.

230 DANTE

loal, which cannot be said of the hest of the Pro-
vencal poets who led the way in this kind. Dante's
sonnets also have a grace and tenderness which
have been seldom matched. His lyrical excellence
would have got him into the Collections, and he
woidd have made here and there an enthusiast as
Donne does in English, but his great claim to re-
membrance is not merely Italian. It is that he
was the first Christian poet, in any proper sense of
the word, the first who so subdued dogma to the
uses of plastic imagination as to make something
that is stiU poetry of the highest order after it has
suffered the disenchantment inevitable in the most
perfect translation. Verses of the kind usually
called sacred (reminding one of the adjective's
double meaning) had been written before his time
in the vulgar tongue, such verses as remain invio-
lably sacred in the volumes of specimens, looked
at ^vith distant reverence by the pious, and with
far other feelings by the profane reader. There
were cycles of poems in which the physical conflict
between Christianity and Paganism ^ furnished the
subject, but in wliich the theological views of the
authors, whether doctrinal or historical, could hardly
be reconciled with any system of religion ancient
or modern. There were Church legends of saints
and martyrs versified, fit certainly to make any
other form of martyrdom seem amiable to those
who heard them, and to suggest palliative thoughts
about Diocletian. Finally, there were the romances

1 The old French poems confound all unbelievers together as
pagans and worshippers of idols.

DANTE 231

of Arthur and his knights, which later, by means
of allegory, contrived to be both entertaining and
edifying ; every one who listened to them paying
the minstrel his money, and having his choice
whether he would take them as song or sermon.
In the heroes of some of these certain Christian
virtues were typified, and around a few of them, as
the Holy Grail, a perfume yet lingers of cloistered
piety and withdrawal. Wolfram von Esehenbach,
indeed, has divided his Parzival into three books,
of Simplicity, Doubt, and Healing, which has led
Gervinus to trace a not altogether fanciful analogy
between that poem and the Divina Commedia.
The doughty old poet, who says of himself, —

' ' Of song I have some slight control,
But deem her of a feeble soul
That doth not love my naked sword
Above my sweetest lyric word,"

tells us that his subject is the choice between good
and evil ;

" Whose soul takes Untruth for its bride
And sets himself on Evil's side,
Chooses the Black, and sure it is
His path leads down to the abyss ;
But he who doth his nature feed
With steadfastness and loyal deed
Lies open to the heavenly light
And takes his portion with the White."

But Wolfram's poem has no system, and shows
good feeling rather than settled conviction. Above
all it is wandering (as he himself confesses), and
altogether wants any controlling purpose. But to
whatever extent Christianity had insinuated itself

232 DANTE

into and colored European literature, it was mainly
as mythology. The Christian idea had never yet
incorporated itself. It was to make its avatar in
Dante. To understand fvdly what he accomplished
we must form some conception of what is meant by
the Christian idea. To bring it into fuller relief,
let lis contrast it with the Greek idea as it appears
in poetry ; for we are not dealing with a question
of theology so much as with one of jesthetics.

Greek art at its highest point is doubtless the
most perfect that we know. But its circle of mo-
tives was essentially limited ; and the Greek drama
in its passion, its pathos, and its humor is prima-
rily Greek, and secondarily human. Its tragedy
chooses its actors from certain heroic families, and
finds its springs of pity and terror in physical suf-
fering and worldly misfortune. Its best examples,
like the Antigone, illustrate a single duty, or, like
the Hippolytus, a single passion, on which, as on
a pivot, the chief character, statuesquely simple in
its details, revolves as pieces of sculpture are some-
times made to do, displaying its different sides in
one invariable light. The general impression left
on the mind (and this is apt to be a truer one tlian
any drawn from single examples) is that the duty
is one which is owed to custom, that the passion
leads to a breach of some convention settled by
common consent,^ and accordingly it is an outraged

^ Dante is an ancient in this respect as in many others, but the
difference is that with him society is something divinely ord;»ined.
He follows Aristotle pretty closely, but on his own theory crime
and sin are identical.

DANTE 233

society whose figure Iooiils in the back^ound,
rather tliaii an oliended (iod. At most it was one
god of many, and meanwhile another might be
friendly. In the Greek e\nc, the gods are parti-
sans, they hold caucuses, they lobby and log-roll
for their candidates. The tacit admission of a re-
vealed code of morals wrousfht a ffreat chanjje.
The complexity and range of passion is vastly in-
creased when the offence is at once both crime and
sin, a wrong done against order and against con-
science at the same time. The relation of the
Greek tragedy to the higher powers is chiefly an-
tagonistic, struggle against an implacable destiny,
sublime struggle, and of heroes, but sure of defeat
at last. And that defeat is final. Grand figures
are those it exhibits to us, in some respects un-
equalled, and in their severe simplicity they com-
pare with modern poetry as sculpture with jiaint-
ing. Considered merely as works of art, these
products of the Greek imagination satisfy our
liigliest conception of form. They suggest inevi-
tably a feeling of perfect completeness, isolation,
and independence, of something rounded and fin-
ished in itself. The secret of those old shapers
died with them ; their wand is broken, their book
sunk deeper than ever plummet sounded. The
tyY>e of their work is the Greek temple, which
leaves nothing to hope for in unity and perfection
of design, in harmony and subordination of parts,
and in entireness of impression. But in this a'S-
thetic completeness it ends. It rests solidly and
complacently on the earth, and the mind rests there
with it.

234 DANTE

Now the Christian idea has to do with the hu-
man soul, which Christianity may be almost said
to have invented. While all Paganism represents
a few preeminent families, the foimders of dynas-
ties or ancestors of races, as of kin with the gods,
Christianity makes every pedigree end in Deity,
makes monarch and slave the children of one God.
Its heroes sti-uggle not against, but upward and
onward toward, the higher powers who are always
on their side. Its highest conception of beauty
is not iesthetic, but moral. With it prosperity
and adversity have exchanged meanings. It finds
enemies in those worldly good-fortunes where Pa-
gan and even Hebrew literature saw the highest
blessing, and invincible allies in sorrow, poverty,
humbleness of station, where the former world
recognized only implacable foes. While it utterly
abolished all boundary lines of race or country
and made mankind unitary, its hero is always the
individual man whoever and wherever he may
be. Above all, an entirely new conception of the
Infinite and of man's relation to it came in with
Christianity. That, and not the finite, is always the
background, consciously or not. It changed the
scene of the last act of every drama to the next
world. Endless aspiration of all the faculties be-
came thus the ideal of Christian life, and to express
it more or less perfectly the ideal of essentially
Christian art. It was this which the Middle Ages
instinctively typified in the Gothic cathedral, — no
accidental growth, but the visible symbol of an in-
ward faith, — which soars forever upward, and

DANTE 235

yearns toward heaven like a martyr-flame suddenly
turned to stone.

It is not without significance that Goethe, who,
like Dante, also absorbed and represented the ten-
dency and spirit of his age, should, during his youth
and while Europe was alive with the moral and in-
tellectual longing which preluded the French Revo-
lution, have loved the Gothic architecture. It is
no less significant that in the period of reaction
toward more positive thought which followed, he
should have preferred the Greek. His gTeatest
poem, conceived during the former era, is Gothic.
Dante, endeavoring to conform himself to literary
tradition, began to write the Divina Commedia in
Latin, and had elaborated several cantos of it in
that dead and intractable material. But that poetic
instinct, which is never the instinct of an individ-
ual, but of his age, coidd not so be satisfied, and
leaving the classic structure he had begun to stand
as a monument of failure, he completed his work
in Italian. Instead of endeavoring to manufacture
a great poem out of what was foreign and artificial,
he let the poem make itself out of him. The epic
which he wished to write in the universal language
of scholars, and which might have had its ten lines
in the history of literature, woidd sing itself in pro-
vincial Tuscan, and turns out to be \\Titten in the
universal dialect of mankind. Thus all great poets
have been in a certain sense provincial, — Homer,
Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, Bums, Scott in the
" Heart of Midlothian " and " Bride of Lammer-
moor," — because the office of the poet is always

236 DANTE

vicarious, because nothing that has not been living
experience can become living expression, because
the collective thought, the faith, the desire of a na-
tion or a race, is the cumulative result of many ages,
is something organic, and is wiser and stronger
than any single person, and will make a great states-
man or a great poet out of any man who can en-
tirely sun-ender himself to it.

As the Gothic cathedral, then, is the type of the
Christian idea, so is it also of Dante's poem. And
as that in its artistic unity is but the completed
thought of a single architect, which yet could never
have been realized except out of the faith and by the
contributions of an entire people, whose beliefs and
superstitious, whose imagination and fancy, find
expression in its statues and its carvings, its calm
saints and martyrs now at rest forever in the seclu-
sion of their canopied niches, and its wanton gro-
tesques thrusting themselves forth from every pin-
nacle and gargoyle, so in Dante's poem, while it is
as personal and pecvdiar as if it were his private
journal and autobiography, we can yet read the
diary and the autobiography of the thirteenth cen-
tury and of the Italian peojjle. Complete and har-
monious in design as his work is, it is yet no Pagan
temple enshrining a tj^e of the human made divine
by triumph of corporeal beauty ; it is not a private
chapel housing a single saint and dedicate to one
chosen bloom of Christian piety or devotion ; it is
truly a cathedral, over whose high altar hangs the
emblem of suffering, of the Divine made human to
teach the beauty of adversity, the eternal presence

DANTE 237

of the spiritual, not overlianging and threatening,
but iuforniinjj^ ami sustaining- the material. In this
cathedral of Dante's there are side-ehapels as is fit,
with altars to all Christian virtues and perfections ;
but the great impression of its leading thought is
that of aspiration, for ever and ever. In the three
divisions of the poem we may trace something more
than a fancied analogy with a Christian basilica.
There is first the ethnic forecourt, then the purga-
torial middle space, and last the holy of holies
dedicated to the eternal presence of the media-
torial God.

But what gives Dante's poem a peculiar claim to
the title of the first Christian poem is not merely its
doctrinal truth or its Christian mythology, but the
fact that the scene of it is laid, not in this world,
but in the soul of man ; that it is the allegory
of a human life, and therefore universal in its sig-
nificance and its application. The genius of Dante
has given to it such a seK-subsistent reality, that
one almost gets to feel as if the chief value of con-
temporar}"^ Italian history had been to furnish it
with explanatory foot-notes, and the age in which it
was wi-itten assumes towards it the place of a satel-
lite. For Italy, Dante is the thirteenth century.

Most men make the voyage of life as if they car-
ried sealed orders which they were not to open till
they were fairly in mid-ocean. But Dante had
ma<le up his mind as to the true purpose and mean-
ing of our existence in this world shortly after he
had passed his twenty-fifth year. He had ali'cady
conceived the system about which as a connecting

238 DANTE

thread the whole experience of his life, the whole
result of his studies, was to cluster in imperishable
crystals. The corner-stone of his system was the
Freedom of the Will (in other words, the right of
private judgment with the condition of accoimta-
bility), which Beatrice calls the " noble virtue." ^
As to every man is offered his choice between good
and evil, and as, even upon the root of a nature
originally evil a habit of ^drtue may be engiafted,^
no man is excused. " All hope abandon ye who
enter in," for they have thrown away reason which
is the good of the intellect, " and it seems to me no
less a marvel to bring back to reason him in whom
it is wholly spent than to bring back to life him
who has been four days in the tomb." ^ As a guide
of the will in civil affairs the Emperor ; in spirit-
ual, the Pope.^ Dante is not one of those reform-
ers who would assume the office of God to " make all
things new." He knew the power of tradition and

1 Purgatorio, XVIII. 73. He defines it in the De Monarchia
(lib. i. § 14). Among^ other thing's he calls it " the first begin-
ning of our liberty." Paradiso, V. 19, 20, he calls it " the great-
est gift that in his largess God creating made." " Dieo qiiod judi-
cium medium est apprehensionis et appetitus.'' (De Monarchia, ubi
supra.)

" Right and wrong,
Between whose endless jar justice resides."

{Troilus and Cressida.)

2 Convito, Tr. IV. c 22.

' ConvVo, Tr. TV. c. 7. " Qui descenderit ad inferos, non ascen-
det." (Job vii. 9.)

* But it may be inferred that he put the interests of mankind
above both. "For citizens," he says, "exist not for the sake of
consuls, nor the people for the sake of the king, but, on the con-
trary, consuls for the sake of citizens, and the king for the sake of
the people."

DAME 239

habit, and wished to utilize it for his purpose. He
foiuiil the Empire and the Papacy ah-eady existing,
but both needing reformation that they might serve
the ends of their original institution. Bad leader-
ship was to blame ; men fit to gird on the sword had
been turned into priests, and good preachers spoiled
to make bad kings.^ The spiritual had usurped to
itseK the prerogatives of the temporal power.

" Rome, that reformed the world, accustomed was

Two suns to have which one road and the other,
Of God and of the worhl, made manifest.
One has the other quenched, and to the crosier
The sword is joined, and ill beseemeth it.

Because, being joined one feareth not the other." ^

Both powers held their authority directly from God,
" not so, however, that the Roman Prince is not in
some things subject to the Roman Pontiff, since
that human felicity [to be attained only by peace,
justice, and good government, possible only under
a single ruler] is in some sort ordained to the end
of immortal felicity. Let Caesar use that reverence
toward Peter which a first-born son ought to use
toward a father ; that, shone upon by the light of
paternal grace, he may more powerfully illumine
the orb of earth over which he is set by him alone
who is the ruler of all things spiritual and tempo-
ral." ^ As to the fatal gift of Constantine, Dante
demonstrates that an Emperor could not alienate
what he held only in trust ; but if he made the
gift, the Pope should hold it as a feudatory of the

1 Paradlso. YIII. 145, 146, « Purgatorio, XVI. 106-112.

' De Monarchia, § ult.

240 DA NTE

Empire, for the benefit, however, of Christ's poor.*
Dante is always careful to distinguish between the
Papacy and the Pope. He prophesies for Boniface
VIII. a place in hell,^ but acknowledges him as the
Vicar of Christ, goes so far even as to denounce
the outrage of Guillaume de Nogaret at Anagni as
done to the Saviour hiniseK.^ But in the Spiritual
AVorld Dante acknowledges no such supremacy,
and, w hen he would have fallen on his knees before
Adrian V., is rebuked by him in a quotation from
the Apocalypse : —

" EiT not, fellow-servant am I
With thee and with the others to one power." *

So impartial was this man whose great work is
so often represented as a kind of bag in which he
secreted the gall of personal prejudice, so truly
Catholic is he, that both parties find their arsenal
in him. The Romanist proves his soundness in
doctrine, the anti-Romanist claims him as the first
Protestant ; the Mazzinist and the Imperialist can
alike quote him for their puri)ose. Dante's ardent
conviction would not let him see that both Church

1 Be Monarchia, lib. iii. § 10. "Poterat tamen Imperator in pa-
trocinium EcclesiiB patrimonium et alia deputare inimoto semper
snperiori dominio eujus nnitas dlvisio non patitur. Poterat et
Vicariiis Dei recipere, non tanquam possessor, sed tanquam fruc-
tnnm pro Ecelesia proquo Christi pauperibus dispensator." He
tolls us that St. Dominic did not ask for the tithes which belong
to the poor of God. (Pamrf/so, Xll. 03, 94.) " Let them return
whence tliey came," he says (De Monarchia, lib. ii. § 10) ; "they
came well, let them return ill, for they were well given and ill
held."

2 Inferno, XIX. 53 ; Paradise, XXX. 145-148.

8 Purgatorio, XX. 8G-92. * Purgatorio, XIX. 134, 135.

DANTE 241

and Empire were on the wane. If an ugly suspi-
cion of this would force itself upon him, perhaps
he only clung to both the more tenaciously ; but
he was no blind theorist. He would reform the
Church through the Church, and is less anxious for
Italian independence than for Italian good govern-
ment imder an Emperor from Germany rather than
from Utopia.

The Papacy was a necessary part of Dante's sys-
tem, as a supplement to the Empire, which we
strongly incline to believe was always foremost in
his mind. In a passage already quoted, he says
that "the soil where Kome sits is worthy beyond
what men preach and admit," that is, as the birth-
place of the Empire. Both m the Convito and the
De Monarchia he affirms that the course of Roman
history was providentially guided from the first.
Rome was founded in the same year that brought
into the world David, ancestor of the Redeemer
after the flesh. St. Augustine said that "God
showed in the most opulent and illustrious Empire
of the Romans how much the civil virtues might
avail even without true religion, that it might be
understood how, this added, men became citizens
of another city whose king is truth, whose law
charity, and whose measure eternity." Dante goes
further than this. He makes the Romans as well
as the Jews a chosen people, the one as founders
of civil society, the other as depositaries of the true
faith.i One side of Dante's mind w^as so practical

^ This results from the ■whole course of his argument in the sec-
ond hook of Ue Monarchia, and in the VI. Paradiso he calls the

242 DANTE

and positive, and his pride in the Romans so in-
tense,^ that he sometimes seems to regard their
mission as the higher of the two. Without peace,
which only good government could give, mankind
coukl not arrive at the highest virtue, whether of
the active or contemplative life. " And since what
is true of the part is true of the whole, and it hap-
pens in the particular man that by sitting quietly
he is perfected in prudence and wisdom, it is clear
that the human race in the quiet or tranquillity of
peace is most freely and easily disposed for its
proper work which is almost divine, as it is writ-
ten, ' Thou hast made him a little lower than the
angels.' ^ Whence it is manifest that universal
peace is the best of those things which are ordained
for our beatitude. Hence it is that not riches, not
pleasures, not honors, not length of life, not health,
not strength, not comeliness, was sung to the shep-
herds from on high, but peace." ^ It was Dante's
experience of the confusion of Italy, where

Roman eagle "the bird of God" and "the scutcheon of God."
We must remember that with Dante God is always the " Emperor
of Heaven," the barons of whose court are the Apostles. (Para-
diso, XXIV. 115 ; lb., XXV. 17. )

^ Dante seems to imply (though his name be German) that he
was of Roman descent. He makes the original inhabitants of
Florence {Inferno, XV. 77, 78) of Roman seed ; and Cacciaguida,
when asked by him about his ancestry, makes no more definite
answer than that their dwelling was in the most ancient part of
the city. ( Paracliso, XVI. 40. )

^ Man was created, according to Dante {Convito, Tr. II. c. 6),
to supply the place of the fallen angels, and is in a sense superior
to the angels, inasmuch as he has reason, which they do not need.

^ De Monorchia, lib. i. § 5.

DANTE 243

" One doth gnaw the other
Of those whom one wall and one fosse shut in," ^

that suggested the thouglit of a universal umpire,
for that, after all, was to be the chief function of
his Emperor. He was too wise to insist on a uni-
formity of political institutions a liriori^ for he
seems to have divined that the surest stay of order,
as of practical wisdom, is habit, which is a gro^vth,
and cannot be made off-hand. He believed with
Aristotle that vigorous minds were intended by na-
ture to rule,^ and that certain races, like certain
men, are bom to leadership.^ He calls democra-
cies, oligarchies, and petty princedoms (tyrannides)
" oblique policies which drive the human race to
slavery, as is patent in all of them to one who rea-
sons." ^ He has nothing but pity for mankind
when it has become a many-headed beast, " despis-
ing the higher intellect irrefragable in reason, the
lower which hath the face of experience." ^ He
had no faith in a turbulent equality asserting the
divine right of /'m as good an you. He thought
it fatal to all discipline : " The confounding of
persons hath ever been the beginning of sickness
in the state," " It is the same thought which Shake-
speare puts in the mouth of Ulysses : —

" Degree being vizarded,

The unworthiest shows as fairly in the raask.

When degree is shaked,

1 Purgatorio, VI. 83, 84. - Be Monarchia, lib. i. § 16.

^ De Monarchia, lib. i. § 5. * De Monarchia, lib. ii. § 7.

® Be Monarchia, lib. i. § 14. ^ Be Monarchia, lib. i. § 18.
' Purgatorio, XVI. 67, &^.

244 DANTE

Which is the ladder to all high designs,
Then enterprise is sick." ^

Yet no one can read Dante without feeling that he
had a high sense of the worth of freedom, whether
in thought or government. He represents, indeed,
the very object of his journey through the triple
realm of shades as a search after liberty.^ But it
must not be that scramble after undefined and in-
definable rights which ends always in despotism,
equally degrading whether ci'owned with a red cap
or an imperial diadem. Ilis theory of liberty has
for its corner-stone the Freedom of the Will, and
the will is free only when the judgment wholly con-
trols the appetite.^ On such a base even a demo-
cracy may rest secure, and on such alone.

Rome was always the central point of Dante's
speculation. A shadow of her old sovereignt}^ was
still left her in the primacy of the Church, to
which unity of faith was essential. He accordingly
has no sympathy with heretics of whatever kind,
lie puts the ex-troubadour Bishop of Marseilles,
chief instigator of the horrors of Provence, in para-
dise.* The Church is infallible in spiritual mat-
ters, but this is an affair of outward discipline
merely, and means the Church as a form of polity.
Unity was Dante's leading doctrine, and there-
fore he puts Mahomet among the schismatics, not
because he divided the Church, but the faith.^

^ Troilus and Cressida, Act I. s. 3. The whole speech is very
remarkable both in thought and phrase.

- Pttrgatorio, I. 71. ^ De Monorchia, lib. i. §. 14.

* Paradiso, IX.

6 Inferno, XXXVIII. ; Furgatorio, XXXII.

DANTE 245

Dante's Church was of this world, but he surely
believed iu another and spiritual one. It has been
questioned whether he was orthodox or not. There
can be no doubt of it so far as outward assent and
conformity are concerned, which he would practise
himself and enforce upon others as the first pos-
tulate of order, the prerequisite for all happiness
in this life. In regard to the Visible Church he
was a reformer, but no revolutionist; it is sheer
ignorance to speak of him as if there were anything
new or exceptional in his denunciation of the cor-
ruptions of the clergy. They were the common-
places of the age, nor were they confined to lay-
men.^ To the absolute authority of the Church
Dante admitted some exceptions. He denies that
the supreme Pontiff has the unlimited power of
bindino- and loosing: claimed for him. " Otherwise
he might absolve me impenitent, which God him-
self could not do." ^

" By malison of theirs is not so lost
Eternal Love that it cannot return." ^

Nor does the sacredness of the office extend to him
who chances to hold it. Philip the Fair himself
could hardly treat Boniface VIII. worse than he.
With wonderful audacity, he declares the Papal
throne vacant by the mouth of Saint Peter himself.*
Even if his theory of a dual government were not

^ See the poems of Walter Mapes (who was Archdeacon of Ox-
ford) ; the Bible Guiot, and the Bible au seignor de Berze, Barba-
zan and M^on, II.

- De Monarchia, lib. iii. § 8

f Purgatorio, III. 133, 1:34

* Paradiso, XXVII. 22.

246 DANTE

in question, Dante must have been very cautious
in meddling with the Church. It was not an age
that stood much upon ceremony. He himself tells
us he had seen men burned alive, and the author
of the Ottimo Comento says : " I the writer saw
followers of his [Fra Dolcino] burned at Padua to
the number of twenty- two together." ^ Clearly,
in such a time as this, one must not make *' the
veil of the mysterious verse " too thin.^

In the affairs of this life Dante was, as we
have said, supremely practical, and he makes pru-
dence the chief of the cardinal virtues.^ He has
made up his mind to take things as they come, and
to do at Rome as the Romans do.

"Ah, savage company! but in the Churcli
With saints, and in the tavern with the gluttons ! " *

In the world of thought it was otherwise, and here
Dante's doctrine, if not precisely esoteric, was cer-
tainly not that of his day, and must be gathered
from hints rather than direct statements. The
general notion of God was still (perhaps is largely
even now) of a jDrovincial, one might almost say a
denominational, Deity. The popidar poets always
represent Macon, Apolin, Tervagant, and the rest
as quasi-deities unable to resist the superior strength
of the Christian God. The Paynim answers the
arguments of his would-be converters with the
taunt that he would never worship a divinity who

1 Turgatorio, XXVII. 18 ; Ottimo, Inferno, XXVIII. 55.

2 Inferno, IX. G3 ; Purgatorio, VIII. 20.

3 Purgatorio, XXIX. l.H, 132.
* Inferno, XXII. 13, 14.

DANTE 247

could not save liimself from being clone ignomini-
ously to death. Dante evidently was not satisfied
with the narrow conception which limits the inter-
est of the Deity to the affairs of Jews and Chris-
tians. That saying of Saint Paul, " Whom, there-
fore, ye iguorantly worship, him declare I unto
you," had perhaps influenced him, but his behef
in the di^•ine mission of the Roman people prob-
ably was conclusive. " The lioman Empire had
the help of miracles in perfecting itself," he says,
and then enumerates some of them. The first is
that " under Numa Pompilius, the second king of
the Romans, when he was sacrificing according to
the rite of the Gentiles, a shield fell from heaven
into the city chosen of God." ^ In the Convito
we find " Virgil speaking in the person of God,"
and -cEacus " wisely having recourse to God," the
god being Jupiter.^ Ephialtes is punished in hell
for rebellion against '' the Supreme Jove," ^ and,
that there may be no misunderstanding, Dante
elsewhere invokes the

' ' Jove Supreme,
Who upon earth for us wast crucified." *

It is noticeable also that Dante, with evident de-
sign, constantly alternates examples drawn from
Christian and Pagan tradition or mythology. ^ He

^ De Monorchia, lib. ii. § 4.

2 Convito, Tr. IV. c. 4; lb., c. 27; ^neid, I. 178, 179; Ovid's
Met., VII.

8 Inferno, XXXI. 92.

* Purgatorio, VI. 118, 119. Pulci, not understanding, has paro-
died this. (Moryante, Canto II. st. 1.)

^ See, for example, Purgatorio, XX. 100-117.

248 DANTE

had conceived a unity in the human race, all of
whose branches had worshipped the same God un-
der divers names and aspects, and had arrived at
the same truth by different roads. We cannot un-
derstand a passage in the twenty-sixth Paradiso,
where Dante inquires of Adam concerning the
names of God, except as a hint that the Chosen
Peoj^le had done in this thing even as the Gentiles
did.^ It is true that he puts all Pagans in Limbo,
"where without hojie they live in longing," and
that he makes baptism essential to salvation.'^ But
it is noticeable that his Limbo is the Elysium of
Virgil, and that he particularizes Adam, Noah,
Moses, Abraham, David, and others as prisoners
there with the rest till the descent of Christ into
hell.^ But were they altogether without hope?
and did baptism mean an immersion of the body
or a purification of the soul ? The state of the
heathen after death had evidently been to Dante
one of those doubts that spring up at the foot
of every truth. In the De MonarcJiia he says :
" There are some judgments of God to which,
though human reason cannot attain by its own

^ We believe that Dante, though he did not understand Greek,
knew something of Hebrew. He would have been likely to study
it as the sacred language, and opportunities of profiting by the
help of learned Jews could not have been wanting to him in his
•wanderings. In the above-cited passage some of the best texts
read I s' appellava, and others ZTn s' appellava. God was called I
(the Je in Jehovah) or One, and afterwards EI, — the strong, —
an epithet given to many gods. Wliichever reading we adopt,
i'. e meaning and the inference from it are the same.

- Inferno, IV.

^ Dante's "Limbo," of course, is the older "Limbus Patrum."

DANTE 249

stren^h, yet is it lifted to them by the help of
faith ami of those things which are saiil to us in
Holy "Writ, — as to this, that no one, however per-
fect in the moral and intellectual virtues both as a
habit [of the mind] and in practice, can be saved
withoixt faith, it being granted that he shall never
have heard anything concerning Chiist ; for the
unaided reason of man cannot look upon this as
just ; nevertheless, with the help of faith, it can." ^
But faith, it slioidd seem, was long in lifting Dante
to this height ; for in the nineteenth canto of the
Paradino^ which must have been written many
years after the passage just cited, the doubt reciu-s
again, and we are told that it was "a cavern,"
concerning which he had " made frequent question-
ing." The answer is given here : —

" Truly to him who with me subtilizes,

If so the Scripture were not over you,

For doubting there were marvellous occasion."

But vfhat Scripture ? Dante seems cautious, tells
us that the eternal judgments are above our com-
prehension, postpones the answer, and when it
comes, puts an orthodox prophylactic before it : —

" Unto this kingdom never
Ascended one who had not faith in Christ,
Before or since he to the tree was nailed.
But look thou, many crying are, ' Christ, Christ ! '
Who at the judgment shall be far less near
To him than some shall be who knew not Christ.'' '

There is, then, some hope for the man born on the
bank of Indus who has never heard of Christ?
Dante is still cautious, but answers the question in-
^ De Monarchia, lib ii- § 8.

250 DANTE

directly in the next canto by putting the Trojan
Ripheus anioug- the blessed : —

" Who would believe, down in the errant world,
That e"er the Trojan Riplieus in this round
Could be the fifth one of these holy liffhts ?
Now knoweth he enougli of what the world
Has not the power to see of grace divine,
Although his sight may not discern the bottom."

Then he seems to hesitate again, brings in the
Church legend of Trajan brought back to life by
the prayers of Gregory the Great that he might be
converted ; and after an interval of jBf ty lines tells
us how Ripheus was saved : —

" The other one, through grace, that from so deep
A fountain wells that never hath tlie eye
Of any creature reached its primal wave,

Set all his love below on righteousness ;

Wherefore from grace to grace did God unclose
His eye to our redemption yet to be,

Whence he believed therein, and suffered not

From that day forth the stench of Paganism,
And he reproved therefor the folk perverse.

Those Maidens three, whom at the right-hand wheel ^
Thou didst behold, were unto him for baptism
More than a thousand years before baptizing."

If the reader recall a passage already quoted from
the Co7ivito,^ he will perhaps think with us that
the gate of Dante's Limbo is left ajar even for the
ancient philosophers to slip out. The divdne judg-
ments are still inscrutable, and the ways of God

1 Faith, Hope, and Charity, {rurgatorio, XXIX. 121.) Mr.
Longfellow has translated the last verse literally. The meaning
is,

'■ More than a thousand years ere baptism was."

- In which the celestial Athens is mentioned.

DANTE 251

past finding out, but faith would seem to have led
Dante at last to a more merciful solution of his
doubt than he had reached when he wrote the De
Monarchia. It is always humanizing to see how
the most rigid creed is matle to bend before the
kindher instincts of the heart. The stern Dante
thinks none beyond hope save those who are dead
in sin, and have made evil their good. But we are
by no means sure that he is not right in insisting
rather on the implacable severity of the law than
on the possible relenting of the judge. Exact jus-
tice is commonly more merciful in the long run
than pity, for it tends to foster in men those
stronger qualities which make them good citizens,
an object second only with the Roman-minded
Dante to that of making them spiritually regener-
ate, nay, perhaps even more important as a neces-
sary preliminary to it. The insci'iption over the
gate of hell tells us that the terms on which we re-
ceive the trust of life were fixed by the Divine
Power (which can what it wills), and are therefore
unchangeable ; by the Highest Wisdom, and there-
fore for our truest good ; by the Primal Love, and
therefore the kindest. These are the three attri-
butes of that justice which moved the maker of
them. Dante is no harsher than experience, which
always exacts the uttermost farthing ; no more in-
exorable than conscience, which never forgives nor
forgets. No teaching is truer or more continually
needful than that the stains of the soul are in-
effaceable, and that though their growth may be
arrested, their nature is to spread insidiously till

252 DANTE

they have brought all to their own color. Evil is

a far more cunning and persevering propagandist

than Good, for it has no inward strength, and is

driven to seek countenance and sympathy. It must

have company, for it cannot bear to be alone in

the dark, while

" Virtue can see to do what Virtue would
By her own radiant light. "

There is one other point which we will dwell on
for a moment as bearing on the question of Dante's
orthodoxy. His nature was one in which, as in
Swedenborg's, a clear practical understanding was
continually streamed over by the northern lights of
mysticism, through which the familiar stars shine
with a softened and more spiritual lustre. Nothing
is more interesting than the way in which the two
qualities of his mind alternate, and indeed play into
each other, tingeing his matter-of-fact sometimes
with unexpected glows of fancy, sometimes giving
an almost geometrical precision to his most mysti-
cal visions. In his letter to Can Grande he says :
" It behooves not those to whom it is given to know
what is best in us to follow the footprints of the
herd ; much rather are they bound to oppose its
wanderinsfs. For the vijjorous in intellect and rea-
son, endowed with a certain divine liberty, are con-
strained by no customs. Nor is it wonderful, since
they are not governed by the laws, but much more
govern the laws themselves." It is not impossible
that Dante, whose love of knowledge was all-em-
bracing, may have got some hint of the doctrine of
the Oriental Sufis. With them the first and lowest

DANTE 253

of the steps that lead upward to perfection is the
Law, a strict observance of which is all that is ex-
pected of the ordinary man whose mind is not open
to the conception of a higher virtue and holiness.
But the Sufi puts himself under the guidance of
some holy man [Virgil in the Inferno], whose
teaching he receives implicitly, and so arrives at
the second step, which is the Path [^Purgatorio]
by which he reaches a point where he is freed from
all outward ceremonials and observances, and has
risen from an outward to a spiritual worship. The
third step is Knowledge [^Paradiso], endowed by
which wdth supernatural insight, he becomes like
the angels about the throne, and has but one far-
ther step to take before he reaches the goal and
becomes one with God. The analogies of this sys-
tem wdth Dante's are obvious and striking. They
become still more so when Virgil takes leave of
him at the entrance of the Terrestrial Paradise
with the words : —

" Expect no more a word or sign from me ;

Free and upright and sound is thy free-will,
And error were it not to do its bidding ;
Thee o'er thyself I therefore crown and mitre," '•

that is, " I make thee king and bishop over thy-
self ; the inward light is to be thy law in things
both temporal and spiritual." The originality of
Dante consists in his not allowing any divorce be-
tween the intellect and the soul in its highest sense,
in his making reason and intuition work together
to the same end of spiritual perfection. The un-
1 Purgatorio, XXVH. 139-142.

254 DANTE

satisfactoriness of science leads Faust to seek re-
pose in worldly pleasure ; it led Dante to find it in
faith, of whose efficacy the shortcoming of all logi-
cal substitutes for it was the most convincing argu-
ment. That we cannot know, is to him a proof
that there is some higher plane on which we can
believe and see. Dante had discovered the incal-
cidable worth of a single idea as compared with
the largest heap of facts ever gathered. To a man
more interested in the soul of things than in the
body of them, the little finger of Plato is thicker
than the loins of Aristotle.

We cannot but think that there is something
like a fallacy in Mr. Buckle's theory that the ad-
vance of mankind is necessarily in the direction of
science, and not in that of morals. No doubt the
laws of morals existed from the beginning, but so
also did those of science, and it is by the applica-
tion, not the mere recognition, of both that the
race is benefited. No one questions how much
science has done for our physical comfort and con-
venience, and with the mass of men these perhaps
must of necessity precede the quickening of their
moral instincts ; but such material gains are illu-
sory, unless they go hand in hand with a corre-
sponding ethical advance. The man who gives
his life for a principle has done more for his kind
than he who discovers a new metal or names a new
gas, for the great motors of the race are moral, not
intellectual, and their force lies ready to the use of
the poorest and weakest of us all. We accept a
truth of science so soon as it is demonstrated, are

DANTE 255

perfectly \villmg to take it on authority, can appro-
priate whatever use tliere may be in it without the
least understanding of its processes, as men send
messages by the electric telegraph, but every truth
of morals must be redemonstrated in the experience
of the individual man before he is capable of util-
izing it as a constituent of character or a guide in
action. A man does not receive the statements
that "two and two make four," and that "the pure
in heart shall see God," on the same terms. The
one can be proved to him with four grains of corn ;
he can never arrive at a belief in the other till he
realize it in the intimate persuasion of his whole
being. This is tyjjified in the mystery of the in-
carnation. The divine reason must forever mani-
fest itself anew in the lives of men, and that as
individuals. This atonement with God, this iden-
tification of the man with the truth,^ so that right
action shall not result from the lower reason of
utility, but from the higher of a will so purified of
self as to sympathize by instinct with the eternal
laws,'"^ is not something that can be done once for
all, that can become historic and traditional, a dead
flower pressed between the leaves of the family
Bible, but must be renewed in every generation,
and in the soul of every man, that it may be valid.

^ 'I conceived myself to be now," says Milton, " not as mine
own person, but as a member incorporate into that truth whereof
I was persuaded."

2 " But now was turning my desire and will.

Even as a wheel that equally is moved.
The Love that moves the sun aud other stars."
(Paradiso, XXXIII., clo.siiiy veises of the Divina Commedia)

256 DANTE

Certain sects show their recognition of this in what
are called revivals, a gross and carnal attempt to
apply truth, as it were, mechanically, and to accom-
plish by the etherization of excitement and the
magnetism of crowds what is possible only in the
solitary exaltations of the soul. This is the high
moral of Dante's poem. We have likened it to a
Christian basilica ; and as in that so there is here
also, painted or carven, every image of beauty and
holiness the artist's mind could conceive for the
adornment of the holy place. We may linger to
enjoy these if we will, but if we follow the central
thought that runs like the nave from entrance to
choir, it leads us to an image of the divine made
human, to teach us how the human might also
make itself divine. Dante beholds at last an image
of that Power, Love, and Wisdom, one in essence,
but trine in manifestation, to answer the needs of
our triple natiu-e and satisfy the senses, the heart,
and the mind.

" Within the deep and luminous subsistence

Of the High Light appeared to me three circles,
Of threefold color and of one dimension,
And by the second seemed the first reflected
As Iris is by Iris, and the third
Seemed fire that equally from both is breathed.

Within itself, of its own very color.

Seemed to me painted with our effigy,
Wherefore my sight was all absorbed therein."

He had reached the high altar where the miracle
of transubstantiation is wrought, itself also a type
of the great conversion that may be accomplished

DANTE 257

in our own nature (the lower thing assuming tlie
qualities of the higher), not by any process of rea-
son, but by the very fire of the divine love.

■' Then there smote my mind
A dash of lightning' wherein came its wish." ^

Perhaps it seems little to say that Dante was the
first great poet who ever made a poem wholly out
of himself, but, rightly looked at, it implies a won-
derful self-reliance and originality in his genius.
His is the first keel that ever ventured into the
silent sea of human consciousness to find a new
world of poetry.

'■ L' acqua ch' io prendo giammai non si corse-" '

He discovered that not only the story of some he-
roic person, but that of any man might be epical ;
that the way to heaven was not outside the world,
but throuoh it. Livinsr at a time when the end of
the world was still looked for as imminent,^ he be-
lieved that the second coming of the Lord was to take
place on no more consj)icuous stage than the soul of

* Dante seem^ to allude directly to this article of the Cath-
olic faith when he says, on entering the Celestial Paradise, " to
signify transhumanizing by words could not be done," and ques-
tions whether he was there in the renewed spirit only or in the
flesh also : —

" If I was merely what of me thou newly

Createdst, Love, who govemest the heavens,
Thou knowest, who didst lift me with thy light ! "

{Paradiso, I. 73-75.)
^ Paradiso, II. 7. Lucretius makes the same boast : —
" Avia Pieridimi peragro loca nullius ante
Trita solo. ' '
» Convitx), Tr. IV. c. 15.

258 DANTE

man ; that his kingdom would be established in the
surrendered will. A poem, the precious distillation
of such a character and such a life as his through
all those sorrowing but undespondent years, must
have a meaning in it which few men have meaning
enough in themselves wholly to pcntrate. That its
allegorical form belongs to a past fashion, with
which the modern mind has little sympathy, we
should no more think of denying than of whitewash-
ing a fresco of Giotto. But we may take it as we
may nature, which is also full of double meanings,
either as picture or as parable, either for the sim-
ple delight of its beauty or as a shadow of the
spiritual world. We may take it as we may his-
tory, either for its picturesqueness or its moral,
either for the variety of its figures, or as a witness
to that perpetual presence of God in his creation of
which Dante was so profoundly sensible. He had
seen and suffered much, but it is only to tlie man
who is himself of value that experience is valuable.
He had not looked on man and nature as most of
us do, with less interest than into the columns of
our daily newspaper. He saw in them the latest
authentic news of the God who made them, for he
carried everywhere that vision washed clear ^vith
tears which detects the meaning under the mask,
and, beneath the casual and transitory, the eternal
keeping its sleepless watch. The secret of Dante's
power is not far to seek. Whoever can express
himself with the full force of unconscious sincerity
will be found to have uttered something ideal and
universal. Dante intended a didactic poem, but

DANTE 259

the most picturesque of poets could not escape his
genius, and his sermon sings and glows and charms
in a manner that surprises more at the fiftieth
reading than the first, such variety of freshness is
in imagination.

There are no doubt in the Divina Commedia (re-
garded merely as poetry) sandy spaces enough both
of physics and metaphysics, but with every deduc-
tion Dante remains the first of descriptive as well
as moral poets. His verse is as various as the feel
ing it conveys ; now it has the terseness and edge
of steel, and now palpitates with iridescent softness
like the breast of a dove. In \'ividness he is with-
out a rival. He drags back by its tangled locks
the unwilling head of some petty traitor of an Ital-
ian provincial town, lets the fire glare on the sullen
face for a moment, and it sears itself into the mem-
ory forever. He shows us an angel glowing with that
love of God which makes him a star even amid the
glory of heaven, and the holy shape keeps lifelong
watch in our fantasy, constant as a sentinel. He
has the skill of conveying impressions indirectly.
In the gloom of hell his bodily presence is revealed
by his stirring something, on the mount of expia-
tion by casting a shadow. Would he have us feel
the brightness of an angel ? He makes him whiten
afar through the smoke like a dawn,^ or, walk-
ing straight toward the setting sun, he finds his
eyes suddenly unable to withstand a greater splen-
dor against which his hand is unavailing to shield

' Purgatorio, XVI. 142. Here is Milton's " Far o£E his coming
shone."

260 DANTE

him. Even its reflected light, then, is brighter
than the direct ray of the sun.^ And how much
more keenly do we feel the parched lips of ^Master
Adam for those rivulets of the Casentino which
run down into the Arno, " making their channels
cool and soft " ! His comparisons are as fresh, as
simple, and as directly from nature as those of
Homer.^ Sometimes they show a more subtle
observation, as where he compares the stooping of
Antaeus over him to the leaning tower of Gari-
senda, to which the clouds, flying in an opposite di-
rection to its inclination, give away their motion.^
His suggestions of individuality, too, from attitude
or speech, as in Farinata, Sordello, or Pia,^ give
in a hint what is worth acres of so-called character-
painting. In straightforward pathos, the single and
sufficient thrust of phrase, he has no competitor.
He is too sternly touched to be effusive and tearful :

" lo non piangeva, si dentro impietrai." ^

His is always the true coin of speech,

1 Purgatorio, XV. 7, et seq.

2 See, for example, In/emo, XVII. 127-132 ; lb. XXIV. 7-12 ;
Purgatorio, 11.124-129; lb., III. 79-84; lb., XXVII. 76-81;
Paradiso, XIX. 91-9-3 ; lb. XXI. 34-39 ; lb. XXIII. 1-9.

3 Inferno, XXXI. 136-138.

" And those thin clouds above, in flakes and bars,
That g-ive away their motion to the stars."

(Coleridge, Dejection, an Ode.)
'See also the comparison of tlie dimness of the faces seen around
him in Paradise to " a pearl on a white forehead.'' ( Paradiso,
III. 14.)

* Inferno, X. 35-41 ; Purgatorio, VI. 61-66 ; lb., X. 133.
^ For example, Cavalcanti's Co7ne dicesti egli ebbe ? (Inferno, X,
67,08.) Anselrauccio's Tu guardi si, padre, eke hai ? (Inferno,
XXXIII. 51.)

DANTE 261

'■ Si lucida e s\ tonda
Che nel suo conio nulla ci s" iiiforsa, "

and never the highly ornamented promise to pay,
token of insolvency.

Xo doubt it is primarily In' his poetic qualities
that a poet must be judged, for it is by these, if by
ami:hing, that he is to maintain his place in litera-
ture. And he must be judged by them absolutely,
with reference, that is, to the highest standard,
and not relatively to the fashions and opportunities
of the age in which he lived. Yet these considera-
tions must fairly enter into our decision of another
side of the question, and one that has much to do
with the true quality of the man, vnth. his charac-
ter as distinguished from his talent, and therefore
with how much he will influence men as well as
dehght them. We may reckon up pretty exactly a
man's advantages and defects as an artist ; these he
has in common with others, and they are to be mea-
sured by a recognized standard ; but there is some-
thing in his genius that is incalculable. It would
be hard to define the causes of the difference of im-
pression made upon us respectively by two such
men as JEschylus and Euripides, but we feel pro-
foundly that the latter, thougli in some respects a
better dramatist, was an infinitely lighter weight.
-S^schylus stirs something in us far deeper than the
sources of mere' pleasurable excitement. The man
behind the verse is far greater than the verse itself,
and the impulse he gives to what is deepest and
most sacred in us, though we cannot always exjjlain
it, is none the less real and lasting. Some men

262 DANTE

always seem to remain outside their work ; others
make their indi\'icluality felt in every part of it ;
their very life Adbrates in every verse, and we do
not wonder that it has '* made them lean for many
years." The virtue that has gone out of them
abides in what they do. The book such a man
makes is indeed, as Milton called it, " the precious
lifeblood of a master spirit." Theirs is a true im-
mortality, for it is their soul, and not their talent,
that survives in their work. Dante's concise forth-
rightness of phrase, which to that of most other
poets is as a stab ^ to a blow with a cudgel, the
vigor of his thought, the beauty of his images, the
refinement of his conception of spiritual things,
are marvellous if we compare him with his age
and its best achievement. But it is for his power
of inspiring and sustaining, it is because they find
in him a spur to noble aims, a secure refuge in
that defeat which the present always seems, that
they prize Dante who know and love him best. He
is not merely a great poet, but an influence, part of
the soul's resources in time of trouble. From him
she learns that, " married to the truth, she is a mis-
tress, but otherwise a slave shut out of all lib-
erty." 2

All great poets have their message to deliver us,
from something higher than they. TVe venture on
no unworthy comparison between him who reveals

^ To the " bestiality " of certain arguments Dante says, " one
•would wish to reply, not with words, but with a knife." (Con-
vito, Tr. IV. c. 14.)

2 Convito, Tr. IV. c. 2.

DANTE 263

to us the beauty of this world's love and the gran-
deur of this world's passion and him who shows
that love of God is the fruit whereof all other loves
are but the beautiful and fleeting blossom, that the
passions are yet sublimer objects of contemplation,
when, subdued by the will, they become patience
in suffering and perseverance in the upward path.
But we cannot help thinking that if Shakespeare
be the most comprehensive intellect, so Dante is
the highest spiritual nature that has expressed it-
self in rhythmical form. Had he merely made us
feel how petty the ambitions, sorrows, and vexa-
tions of earth appear when looked down on from
the heights of our own character and the seclusion
of our own genius, or from the region where we
commune with God, he had done much :

" I with my sight returned through one and all

The sevenfold spheres, and I beheld this globe
Such that I smiled at its ignoble semblance." ^

But he has done far more ; he has shown us the
way by which that country far beyond the stars
may be reached, may become the habitual dwelling-
place and fortress of our nature, instead of being
the object of its vague aspiration in moments of
indolence. At the Round Table of King Arthur
there- was left always one seat empty for him who
should accomplish the adventure of the Holy Grail,
It was called the perilous seat because of the dan-
gers he must encounter who would wdn it. In the
companv of the epic poets there was a place left
for whoever should embody the Christian idea of a
1 Paradiso, XXH. 132-135; lb., XXVU. 110.

264 DANTE

triumphant life, outwardly all defeat, inwardly vic-
torious, who should make us partakers of that cup
of sorrow in which all are communicants with
Christ. He who should do this would indeed
achieve the perilous seat, for he must combine
poesy with doctrine in such cunning wise that the
one lose not its beauty nor the other its severity, —
and Dante has done it. As he takes possession of
it we seem to hear the cry he himself heard when
Virgil rejoined the company of great singers,

" All honor to the loftiest of poets ! "

SPENSER

1875

Chaucer had been in his grave one hundred
and fifty years ere England had secreted choice
material enough for the making of another great
poet. The nature of men living together in socie-
ties, as of the individual man, seems to have its pe-
riodic ebbs and floods, its oscillations between the
ideal and the matter-of-fact, so that the doubtfid
boundary line of shore between them is in one gen-
eration a hard sandy actuality strewn only with
such remembrances of beauty as a dead sea-moss
here and there, and in the next is whelmed with
those lacelike curves of ever-gaining, ever-receding
foam, and that dance of joyous spray which for a
moment catches and holds the sunshine.

From the two centuries between 1400 and 1600
the indefatigable Ritson in his Bihliograpliia Po-
etica has made us a catalogue of some six hundred
English poets, or, more properly, verse-makers.
Ninety-nine in a hundred of them are mere names,
most of them no more than shadows of names, some
of them mere initials. Nor can it be said of them
that their works have perished because they were
written in an obsolete dialect ; for it is the poem
that keeps the language alive, and not the language

266 SPENSER

that buoys up the poem. The revival of letters, as
it is called, was at first the revival of ancient let-
ters, which, while it made men pedants, could do
very little towards making them ])oets, much less
towards making them original writers. There
was nothing left of the fresliness, vivacity, inven-
tion, and careless faith in the present which make
many of the productions of the Norman Trouveres
delightful reading even now. The whole of Eu-
rope during the fifteenth century produced no
book which has continued readable, or has become
in any sense of the word a classic. I do not mean
that that century has left us no illustrious names,
that it w^as not enriched with some august intel-
lects who kept alive the apostolic succession of
thought and speculation, who passed along the still
unextinguished torch of intelligence, the lampada
vita;, to those who came after them. But a clas-
sic is properly a book which maintains itself by
virtue of that happy coalescence of matter and
style, that innate and exquisite sympathy between
the thought that gives life and the form that con-
sents to every mood of grace and dignity, which
can be simple without being vulgar, elevated with-
out being distant, and which is something neither
ancient nor modern, always new and incapable of
gi'owing old. It is not his Latin which makes
Horace cosmopolitan, nor can Beranger's French
prevent his becoming so. No hedge of language
however thornj^ no dragon-coil of centuries, will
keep men away from these true apples of the Hes-
perides if once they have caught sight or scent of

SPENSER 267

them. If poems die, it is because there was never
true life in them, that is, that true poetic vitality
which no ilepth of thought, no airiness of fancy, no
sincerity of feeling, can singly communicate, but
which leaps throbbing at touch of that shaping
faculty the imagination. Take Aristotle's ethics,
the scholastic philosophy, the theology of Aquinas,
the Ptolemaic system of astronomy, the small poli-
tics of a provincial city of the Middle Ages, mix in
at will Grecian, Roman, and Christian mythology,
and tell me what chance there is to make an im-
mortal poem of such an incongruous mixture. Can
these dry bones live ? Yes, Dante can create such
a soul under these ribs of death that one hundred
and fifty editions of his poem shall be called for in
these last sixty years, the first half of the sixth cen-
tury since his death. Accordingly I am apt to be-
lieve that the complaints one sometimes hears of
the neglect of our older literature are the regrets
of archieologists rather than of critics. One does
not need to advertise the squirrels where the nut-
trees are, nor could any amount of lecturing per-
suade them to spend their teeth on a hollow nut.

On the whole, the Scottish poetry of the fifteenth
century has more meat in it than the English, but
this is to say very little. Where it is meant to be
serious and lofty it falls into the same vices of un-
reality and allegory which were the fashion of the
day, and which there are some patriots so fearfully
and wonderfully made as to relish. Stripped of
the archaisms (that turn every y to a meaningless
2, spell which quhilk, shake schaik, bugle bowgilly

268 SPENSER

powder puldir, and will not let us simply whistle
till we have puckered our mouths to quhissill} in
which the Scottish antiquaries love to keep it dis-
guised, — as if it were nearer to poetry the further
it got from all human recognition and S3'mpathy, —
stripped of these, there is little to distinguish it
from the contemporary verse-mongering south of
the Tweed. Their compositions are generally as
stiff and artificial as a trellis, in striking contrast
with the po23ular ballad-poetry of Scotland (some
of which possibly falls within this period, though
most of it is later), which clambers, lawlessly if you
will, but at least freely and simply, tv\4ning the
bare stem of old tradition with gracefid sentiment
and lively natural sympathies. I find a few sweet
and flowing verses in Dunbar's " Merle and Night-
ingale,"— indeed one whole stanza that has always
seemed exqiusite to me. It is this : —

" Ne'er sweeter noise was heard by livinfj man
Than made this merry, gentle nightingale.
Her sound went with the river as it ran
Out through the fresh and flourished lusty vale ;
O merle, quoth she, O fool, leave off thy tale,
For in thy song good teaching there is none,
For both are lost, — the time and the travail
Of every love but upon God alone."

But except this lucky poem, I find little else in the
serious verses of Dunbar that does not seem to me
tedious and pedantic. I dare say a few more lines
might be found scattered here and there, but I
hold it a sheer waste of time to hunt after these
thin needles of wit buried in unwieldy haystacks
of verse. If that be genius, the less we have of it

SPENSER 269

the Letter. His " Danoe of the Seven Deadly
Sins," over which the excellent Lord Iluiles went
into raptures, is wanting in everything but coarse-
ness ; and if his invention tlance at all, it is like a
galley-slave in chains under the lash. It would be
well for us if the sins themselves were indeed such
wi-etched bugaboos as he has painted for us. AVhat
he means for humor is but the dullest vulgarity ;
his satire would be Billingsgate if it could, and,
failing, becomes a mere offence in the nostrils, for
it takes a great deal of salt to keep scurrility sweet.
Mr. Sibbald, in his " Chronicle of Scottish Poetry,"
has admiringly preserved more than enough of it,
and seems to find a sort of national savor therein,
such as delights his countrymen in a haggis, or the
German in his sauer-kraut. The uninitiated for-
eigner puts his handkerchief to his nose, wonders,
and gets out of the way as soon as he civilly can.
Barbour's " Brus," if not precisely a poem, has
passages whose simple tenderness raises them to
that level. That on Freedom is familiar.^ But its
highest merit is the natural and unstrained tone of
manly courage in it, the easy and familiar way in
which Barbour alwa3's takes chivalrous conduct as
a matter of course, as if heroism were the least you
coidd ask of any man. I modernize a few verses
to show what I mean. When the King of England
turns to fly from the battle of Bannockburn (and

^ Though always misapplied in quotation, as if he had used the
word in that generalized meaning which is common now, but
which could not without an impossible anachronism have been
present to his miud. He meant merely freedom from prison.

270 SPhNSER

Barbour with his usual generosity tells us he has
heard that Sir Aymer de Valence led him away
by the bridle-rein against his will), Sir Giles
d'Argente

" Saw the kins' thus and his menie
Shape them to flee so speedily,
He came right to the king in hy [hastily]
And said, ' Sir, since that is so
That ye thus gate your gate will go,
Have ye good-day, for back will I :
Yet never fled I certainly,
And I choose here to bide and die
Than to live shamefully and fly.' "

The " Brus " is in many ways the best rhymed
chronicle ever written. It is national in a high
and generous way, but I confess I have little faith
in that quality in literature which is commonly
called nationality, — a kind of praise seldom given
where there is anything better to be said. Liter-
ature that loses its meaning, or the best part of it,
when it gets beyond sight of the parish steeple, is
not what I understand by literature. To tell you
when you cannot fully taste a book that it is be-
cause it is so thoroughly national, is to condemn
the book. To say it of a poem is even worse, for
it is to say that what should be true of the whole
compass of human nature is true only to some
north-and-by-east-half-east point of it. I can un-
derstand the nationality of Firdusi when, looking
sadly back to the former glories of his country, he
tells us that " the nightingale still sings old Per-
sian " ; I can understand the nationality of Burns
when he turns his plough aside to spare the rough

SPENSER 271

burr thistle, and hopes he may ^\Tite a song or two
for dear auld Scotia's sake. That sort of national-
ity belongs to a country of which we are all citi-
zens,— that country of the heart which has no
boundaries laid down on the map. All great poe-
try must smack of the soil, for it must be rooted in
it, must suck life and substance from it, but it must
do so with the aspiring instinct of the pine that
climbs forever toward diviner air, and not in the
grovelling fashion of the potato. Any verse that
makes you and me foreigners is not only not great
poetry, but no poetry at all. Dunbar's works were
disinterred and edited some thirty years ago by
Air. Laing, and whoso is national enough to like
thistles may browse there to his heart's content.
I am inclined for other jjasture, having long ago
satisfied mvseK bv a o^ood deal of dos^ged reading
that every generation is sure of its own share of
bores without borrowing from the past.

A little later came Gawain Douglas, whose trans-
lation of the ^Eneid is linguistically valuable, and
whose introductions to the seventh and twelfth books
— the one describing winter and the other May —
have been safely praised, they are so hard to read.
There is certainly some poetic feeling in them, and
the welcome to the sun comes as near enthusiasm as
is possible for a ploughman, with a good steady yoke
of oxen, who lays over one furrow of verse, and
then turns about to lay the next as cleverly along-
side it as he can. But it is a vTong done to good
taste to hold up this item kind of description any
longer as deserving any other credit than that of

272 SPENSER

a good memory. It is a mere bill of parcels, a
post-mortem inventory of nature, where ima^na-
tion is not merely not called for, but would be out
of place. Why, a recipe in the cookery-book is as
much like a good dinner as this kind of stuff is like
true word-painting. The poet with a real ej'e in
his head does not give us everything, but only the
best of everything. He selects, he combines, or
else gives what is characteristic only ; while the
false style of which I have been sjieaking seems to
be as glad to get a pack of impertinences on its
shoulders as Christian in the Pilgrim's Progress
was to be rid of his. One strong verse that can
hold itself upright (as the French critic liivarol
said of Dante) with the bare help of the substan-
tive and verb, is worth acres of this dead cord- wood
piled stick on stick, a boundless continuity of dry-
ness. I would rather have ^vl•itten that half-stanza
of Longfellow's, in the " Wreck of the Hesperus,"
of the " billow that swept her crew like icicles from
her deck," than all Gawain Douglas's tedious enu-
meration of meteorological phenomena put together.
A real landscape is never tiresome ; it never pre-
sents itself to us as a disjointed succession of iso-
lated particulars ; we take it in with one sweep of
the eye, — its light, its shadow, its melting grada-
tions of distance : we do not say it is this, it is that,
and the other ; and we may be sure that if a descrip-
tion in poetry is tiresome there is a grievous mis-
take somewhere. All the pictorial adjectives in
the dictionary wiU not bring it a hair's-breadth
nearer to truth and nature. The fact is that what

SPENSER 273

we see is in the mind to a greater degree than we
are commonly aware. As Coleridge says, —

" O lady, we receive but what we give,
And in our life alone doth Nature live ! "

I have made the unfortunate Dunbar the text for
a diatribe on the subject of descriptive poetry, be-
cause I find that this old ghost is not laid yet, but
comes back like a vampire to suck the life out of a
true enjoyment of poetry, — and the medicine by
which vampires were cured was to imbury them,
drive a stake through them, and get them under
ground again with all despatch. The first duty of
the Muse is to be delightful, and it is an injury
done to all of us when we are put in the WTong by
a kind of statutory affirmation on the part of the
critics of something to which our judgment will not
consent, and from which our taste revolts. A col-
lection of poets is commonly made up, nine parts
in ten, of this perfunctory verse-making, and I
never look at one without regretting that we have
lost that excellent Latin phrase, Corjnis poetarum.
In fancy I always read it on the backs of the vol-
umes,— a body of poets, indeed, with scarce one
soul to a hundred of them.

One genuine English poet illustrated the early
years of the sixteenth century, — John Skelton.
He had vivacity, fancy, humor, and originality.
Gleams of the truest poetical sensibility alternate
in him with an almost brutal coarseness. He was
truly Rabelaisian before liabelais. But there is a
freedom and hilarity in much of his writing that
gives it a singular attraction. A breath of cheer-

274 SPENSER

fulness runs along the slender stream of his verse,
under which it seems to ripple and crinkle, catch-
ing and casting back the sunshine like a stream
blown on by clear western winds.

But Skelton was an exceptional blossom of au-
tumn. A long and dreary winter follows. Surrey,
who brought back with him from Italy the blank-
verse not long before introduced by Trissino, is to
some extent another exception. He had the sen-
timent of nature and unhackneyed feeling, but he
has no masten,' of verse, nor any elegance of dic-
tion. We have Gascoigne, Surrey, AVyatt, stiff, pe-
dantic, artificial, systematic as a country cemetery,
and, worst of all, the whole time desperately in
love. Every verse is as flat, thin, and regular as a
lath, and their poems are nothing more than bun-
dles of such tied trimly together. They are said to
have refined our language. Let us devoutly hope
they did, for it would be pleasant to be grateful to
them for something. But I fear it was not so, for
only genius can do that : and Sternhold and Hop-
kins are inspired men in comparison with them.
For Sternhold was at least the author of two noble
stanzas : —

" The Lord descended from above
And bowed the heavens high,
And underneath his feet he east
The darkness of the sky ;

" On cherubs and on chembims
Full royally he rode,
And on the wings of all the winds
Came flying all abroad."'

But Gascoigne and the rest did nothing more than

SPENSER 275

put the worst school of Italian love poetry into an
awkward Eng^lish dress. The Italian proverb says,
'* Inglese italianizzato, Diavolo inearnato," that an
Englishman Italianized is the very devil incarnate,
and one feels the trnth of it here. The very titles
of their poems set one yawning, and their wit is the
cause of the duhiess that is in other men. " The
lover, deceived by his love, repenteth him of the
ti-ue love he bare her." As thus : —

*' '^Tiere I sought heaven there found I hap ;
From danger unto death,
Much like the mouse that treads the trap

In hope to find her food,
And bites the bread that stops her breath, —
So in like case I stood."

"Tlie lover, accusing- his love for her unfaithful-
ness, proposeth to live in liberty." He says : —

" But I am like the beaten fowl
That from the net escaped,
And thou art like the ravening owl
That all the night hath waked."

And yet at the very time these men were writing
there were simple ballad-writers who could have
set them an example of simplicity, force, and
grandeur. Compare the futile efforts of these poet-
asters to kindle themselves by a painted flame,
and to be pathetic over the lay figure of a mistress,
with the wild vigor and almost fierce sincerity of
the " Twa Corbies " : —

" As I was walking all alone
I heard twa corbies making a moan.
The one unto the other did say.
Where shall we gang dine to-day ?
In beyond that old turf dyke

276 SPENSER

I wot there lies a new-slain knight ;

And naebody kens that he lies there

But his hawk and his hound and his lady fair.

His hound is to the hunting gone,

His hawk to fetch the wild fowl home,

His lady has ta'en another mate,

So we may make our dinner sweet.

O'er his white bones as they lie bare

The wind shall blow forevermair."

There was a lesson in rhetoric for our worthy
friends, could they have understood it. But they
were as much afraid of an attack of nature as of
the plague.

Such was the poetical inheritance of style and
diction into which Spenser was born, and which he
did more than any one else to redeem from the
leaden gripe of vulgar and pedantic conceit. Sir
Philip Sidney, born the jear after him, with a
keener critical instinct, and a taste earlier emanci-
pated than his own, would have been, had he lived
longer, perhaps even more directly influential in
educating the taste and refining the vocabvdary of
his contemporaries and immediate successors. The
better of his pastoral poems in the " Arcadia " are,
in my judgment, more simple, natural, and, above
all, more pathetic than those of Sj)enser, who some-
times strains the shepherd's pipe with a blast that
would better suit the trumpet. Sidney had the
good sense to feel that it was unsophisticated senti-
ment rather than rusticity of jshrase that befitted
such themes.^ He recognized the distinction be-
tween simplicity and vulgarity, which Wordsworth

^ In his Defence of Poesy he condemns the archaisms and pro-
vincialisms of the Shepherd's Calendar.

SPENSER 277

was so long in finding oiit, and seems to have
divined the fact that there is but one kind of Eng-
lish that is always appropriate and never obsolete,
namely, the very best.^ With the single exception
of Thomas Campion, his experiments in adapting
classical metres to English verse are more success-
ful than those of his contemporaries. Some of his
elegiacs are not ungrateful to the ear, and it can
hardly be doubted that Coleridge borrowed from
his eclogue of Strephon and Klaius the pleasing
movement of his own CatuUian Ilendecasyllabics.
Spenser, perhaps out of deference to Sidney, also
tried his hand at English hexameters, the introduc-
tion of which was claimed by his friend Gabriel
Harvey, who thereby conceived that he had assured
to himself an immortality of grateful remembrance.
But the result was a series of jolts and jars, prov-
ing that the language had run off the track. He
seems to have been half conscious of it himself,
and there is a gleam of mischief in what he writes
to Harvey : " I like your late English hexameter
so exceedingly well that I also enure ray pen some-
time in that kind, which I find indeed, as I have
often heard you defend in word, neither so hard
nor so harsh but that it will easily yield itseK to
our mother-tongue. For the only or chiefest hard-
ness, which seemeth, is in the accent, which some-

1 "There is, as you must have heard Wordsworth point out, a
language of pure, intelligible English, which was spoken in Chau-
cer's time, and is spoken in oui-s ; equallj' understood then and
now ; and of which the Bible is the written and permanent stand-
ard, as it has undoubtedly been the great means of preserving it."
{Southey's Life and Correspondence, iii. 193, 19-1.)

278 SPENSER

time gapetli, and, as it were, yawneth ill-favoredly,
coming short of that it should, and sometime ex-
ceeding the measure of the number, as in Carpen-
ter ; the middle syllable being used short in speech,
when it shall be read long in verse, seemeth like a
lame gosling that draweth one leg after her ; and
Heaven being used short as one syllable, when it is
in verse stretched out with a diastole, is like a
lame dog that holds up one leg." ^ It is almost in-
conceivable that Spenser's hexameters should have
been written by the man who was so soon to teach
his native language how to soar and sing, and to
give a fuller sail to English verse.

One of the most striking facts in our literary
history is the preeminence at once so frankly and
unanimously conceded to Spenser by his contempo-
raries. At first, it is true, he had not many rivals.
Before the " Faery Queen " two long poems w'ere
printed and popular, — the " Mirror for Magis-
trates " and Warner's " Albion's England," — and
not long after it came the " Polyolbion " of Dray-
ton and the " Civil Wars " of Daniel. This was
the period of the saurians in English poetry, inter-
minable poems, book after book and canto after
canto, like far-stretching vertehrce, that at first

^ Nash, who has far better claims than Swift to he called the
English Rabelais, thus at once describes and parodies Harvey's
hexameters in prose, "that drunken, staggering kind of verse,
which is all up hill and down hill, like the way betwixt Stamford
and Beechfield, and goes like a horse plunging through the mire
in the deep of winter, now soused up to the saddle, and straight
aloft on his tiptoes " It was a happy thought to satirize (in this
inverted way) prose written in the form of verse, for the last
twelve words make a hexameter.

SPENSER 279

sight would seem to have rendered earth unfit for
the habitation of man. They most of them sleep
well now, as once they made their readers sleep,
and their huge remains lie embedded in the deep
morasses of Chalmers and Anderson. We wonder
at the length of face and general atrabilious look
that mark the portraits of the men of that genera-
tion, but it is no marvel when even their relaxations
were such downright hard work. Fathers when
their day on earth was up must have folded down
the leaf and left the task to be finished by their
sons, — a dreary inheritance. Yet both Drayton
and Daniel are fine poets, though both of them in
their most elaborate works made shipwreck of their
genius on the shoal of a bad subject. Neither of
them could make poetry coalesce with gazetteering
or chronicle-making. It was like trying to put a
declaration of love into the forms of a declaration
in trover. The " Polyolbion " is nothing less than
a versified gazetteer of England and Wales, — for-
tunately Scotland was not yet annexed, or the poem
would have been even longer, and already it is the
plesiosaurus of verse. Mountains, rivers, and even
marshes are personified, to narrate historical epi-
sodes, or to give us geographical lectures. There
are two fine verses in the seventh book, where,
speaking of the cutting down some noble woods, he
says, —

"Tbeir trunks like aged folk now bare and naked stand,^
As for revenge to heaven each held a withered hand " ;

and there is a passage about the sea in the twen-

' Probably suggested by a verse of Spenser cited infra.

280 SPENSER

tieth book that comes near being fine ; but the far
greater part is mere joiner-work. Consider the
life of man, that we flee away as a shadow, that
our days are as a post, and then think whether we
can afford to honor such a draft upon our time as
is implied in these thirty books all in alexandrines !
Even the laborious Selden, who wrote annotations
on it, sometimes more entertaining than the text,
gave out at the end of the eighteenth book. Yet
Drayton could write well, and had an agreeable
lightsomeness of fancy, as his " Nymph idia " proves.
Ilis poem " To the Cambrio-Britons on their Harp "
is full of vigor ; it runs, it leaps, clashing its verses
like swords upon buclders, and moves the pulse to
a charge.

Daniel was in all respects a man of finer mould.
He did indeed refine our tongue, and deserved the
praise his contemporaries concur in giving him of
being " well-languaged." ^ Writing two hundred
and fifty yeais ago, he stands in no need of a glos-
sary, and I have noted scarce a dozen words, and
not more turns of phrase, in his works, that have
become obsolete. This certainly indicates both re-
markable taste and equally remarkable judgment.
There is a conscious dignity in his thought and

1 Edmund Bolton in his Hypercritica says, " The works of Sam
Daniel contained somewhat a flat, but yet withal a very pure and
copious English, and words as warrantable as any man's, axvA JitUr
jierhaps for prose than measure.'^ I have italicized his second
thoug-ht, which chimes curiously with the feeling Daniel leaves
in the mind. (See Haslewood's Ancient Crit- Essays, vol. ii.)
Wordsworth, an excellent judge, much admired Daniel's poem to
the Countess of Cumberland-

SPENSER 281

sentiment such as we rarely meet. His best poems
always remiml me of a table-land, where, because
all is so level, we are apt to forget on how lofty a
l)lane we are standing. I think his " Musophilus "
the best j)oem of its kind in the language. The
reflections are natural, the expression condensed,
the thought weiglity, and the language worthy of
it. But he also wasted himself on an historical
poem, in which the characters were incapable of
that remoteness from ordinary associations which
is essential to the ideal. Not that we can escape
into the ideal by merely emigrating into the past
or the unfamiliar. As in the German legend the
little black Kobold of prose that haunts us in
the present will seat himself on the first load of
furniture when we undertake our flitting, if the
magician be not there to exorcise him. No man
can jump off his own shadow, nor, for that matter,
off his own age, and it is very likely that Daniel
had only the thinking and languaging parts of a
poet's outfit, without the higher creative gift which
alone can endow his conceptions with enduring life
and with an interest which transcends the parish
limits of his generation. In the prologue to his
" Masque at Court " he has unconsciously defined
his own poetry : —

" Wherein no wild, no rude, no antic sport,
But tender passions, motions soft and grave.
The still spectator must expect to have."

And indeed his verse does not snatch you away
from ordinary associations and hurry you along
with it as is the wont of the higher kinds of poetry,

282 SPENSER

but leaves you, as it were, upon the bank watching
the peaceful current and lulled by its somewhat
monotonous murmur. His best-known poem, blun-
deringly misprinted in all the collections, is that
addressed to the Countess of Cumberland. It is an
am2)lification of Horace's Integer Vitce^ and when
we compare it with the original we miss the point,
the compactness, and above all the urbane tone of
the original. It is very fine English, but it is the
English of diplomacy somehow, and is never down-
right this or that, but always has the honor to be
so or so, with sentiments of the highest consider-
ation. Yet the praise of u'ell-languaged, since it
implies that good writing then as now demanded
choice and forethought, is not without interest for
those who woukl classify the elements of a style
that will wear and hold its colors well. His dic-
tion, if wanting in the more hardy evidences of
muscle, has a supjileness and spring that give proof
of training and endurance. His " Defence of
Rhyme," written in prose (a more difficidt test than
verse), has a passionate eloquence that reminds
one of Burke, and is more light-armed and mod-
ern than the prose of ISIilton fifty years later. For
us Occidentals he has a kindly prophetic word : —

" And who in time knows whither we may vent

The treasure of our tongue ? to what strange shores

The gain of our best glory may be sent

To enrich unknowing nations with our stores ?

^yhat worlds in the yet unformed Occident

May come refined with accents that are ours ? ' '

During the period when Spenser was getting his

artistic training, a great change was going on in

SPENSER 283

our mother-tongno, and tlie lanpiage of literature
was disengaging itself more and more from that of
ordinary talk. The poets of Italy, Spain, and
France began to rain influence and to modify and
refine not only stN^le but vocabulary. Men were
discovering new worlds in more senses than one, and
the visionary finger of expectation still pointed for-
ward. Tliere was, as we learn from contemporary
pamplilets, very much the same demand for a na-
tional literature that we have heard in America.
This demand was noblv answered in the next sfen-
eration. But no man contributed so much to the
transformation of style and language as Spenser ;
for not only did he deliberately endeavor at re-
form, but by the charm of his diction, the novel
harmonies of his verse, his ideal method of treat-
ment, and the splendor of his fancy, he made the
new manner popular and fruitful. We can trace
in Spenser's poems the gradual growth of his taste
through experiment and failure to that assured
self-confidence which indicates that he had at
length found out the true bent of his genius, —
that happiest of discoveries (and not so easy as it
might seem) which puts a man in undisturbed pos-
session of his own individuality. Before his time
the boundary between poetry and prose had not
been clearly defined. His great merit lies not
only in the ideal treatment with which he glorified
common things and gilded them with a ray of en-
thusiasm, but far more in the ideal point of view
which he first revealed to his countrymen. He at
first sought for that remoteness, which is implied in

284 SPENSER

an escape from the realism of daily life, in the pas-
toral, — a kind of writing which, oddly enough,
from its original intention as a protest in favor of
naturalness, and of human as opposed to heroic
sentiments, had degenerated into the most artificial
of abstractions. But he was soon convinced of his
error, and was not long in choosing between an un-
reality which pretended to be real and those ever-
lasting realities of the mind which seem unreal
only because they lie beyond the horizon of the
every-day world, and become visible only when the
mirage cf fantasy lifts them up and hangs them in
an ideal atmosphere. As in the old fairy-tales, the
task which the age imposes on its poet is to weave
its straw into a golden tissue ; and when every
device has failed, in comes the wdtch Imagination,
and with a toiich the miracle is achieved, simple as
miracles always are after they are A\Tought.

Spenser, like Chaucer a Londoner, was born in
1553.^ Nothing is known of his parents, except
that the name of his mother was Elizabeth ; but
he was of gentle birth, as he more than once in-
forms us, with the natural satisfaction of a poor
man of genius at a time when the business talent
of the middle class was opening to it the door of
prosperous preferment. In 1569 he was entered

^ Mr. Hales, in the excellent memoir of the poet prefixed to
the Globe edition of his works, puts his birth a year earlier, on
the strength of a line in the sixtieth sonnet. Bnt it is not estab-
lished that this sonnet was written in 1593, and even if it were,
a sonnet is not npon oath, and the poet wonld prefer the round
number forty, which suited the measure of his verse, to thirty-
nine or forty-one, which might have been truer to the measure of
his days.

SPENSER 285

as a sizar at Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, and in
due course took his bachelor's degree in 1573, and
his master's in 1576. He is supposed, on insuffi-
cient grounds, as it appears to nie, to have met
with some disgust or disappointment during his
residence at the University.^ Between 157G and
1578 Spenser seems to have been with some of his
kinsfolk " in the North." It was during this in-
terval that he conceived his fruitless passion for
the Rosalinde, whose jilting him for another shep-
herd, whom he calls Menalcas, is somewhat per-
functorily bemoaned in his pastorals.^ Before the

^ This has been inferred from a passage in one of Gabriel Har-
vey's letters to him. But it would seem more natural, from the
many allusions in Harvey's pamphlets against Nash, that it was
his own wrongs which he had in mind, and his self-absorption
would take it for granted that Spenser sympathized with him in
all his grudges. Harvey is a remarkable instance of the refining
influence of classical studies. Amid the pedantic farrago of his
omni -sufficiency (to borrow one of his own words) we come sud-
denly upon passages whose gravity of sentiment, stateliness of
movement, and purity of diction remind us of Landor. These
lucid intervals in his overweening vanity explain and justify the
friendship of Spenser. Yet the reiteration of emphasis with
wliich he insists on all the world's knowing that Nash had called
him an ass, probably gave Shakespeare the hint for one of the
most comic touches in the character of Dogberry.

^ The late Major C. G. Halpine, in a very interesting essay,
makes it extremely probable that Kosalinde is the anagram of
Rose Daniel, sister of the poet, and married to John Florio. He
leaves little doubt, also, that the name of Spenser's wife (hitherto
unknown) was Elizabeth Nagle. (See Atlantic Monthly, vol. ii.
074, November, 1858.) Mr. Halpine informed me that he found
the substance of his essay among the papers of his father, the
late Rsv. N. J. Halpine, of Dublin. The latter published in thi
series of the Shakespeare Society a sprightly little tract entitled
Oberon, which, if not quite convincing, is well worth reading for
its ingenuity and research.

286 SPENSER

publication of his " Shepherd's Calendar " in 1579,
he had made the actpiaintance of Sir Philip Sidney,
and was domiciled with him for a time at Peushurst,
whether as guest or literary dependant is uncertain.
In October, 1579, he is in the household of the
Earl of Leicester. In July, 1580, he accompanied
Lord Grey de Wilton to Ireland as Secretary, and
in that country he spent the rest of his life, with
occasional flying visits to England to publish poems
or in search of preferment. His residence in that
country has been compared to that of Ovid in Pon-
tus. And, no doubt, there were certain outward
points of likeness. The Irishry by whom he was
surrounded were to the full as savage, as hostile,
and as tenacious of their ancestral habitudes as
the Scythians ^ who made Tomi a prison, and the
descendants of the earlier English settlers had de-
generated as much as the Mix-Hellenes who dis-
gusted the Latin poet. Spenser himself looked
on his life in Ireland as a banishment. In his
*' Colin Clout 's come Home again " he tells us
that Sir Walter Ealeigh, who visited him in 1589,
and heard what was then finished of the " Faery
Queen," —

" 'Gan to east great liking to my lore
And great disliking to my luckless lot,
That banisht had myself, like wight f orlore,
Into that waste, where I was quite forgot.
The which to leave thenceforth he counselled me,
Unmeet for man in whom was aught regardful,
And wend with him his Cynthia to see.
Whose grace was great and bounty most rewardful."

^ In his prose tract on Ireland, Speuser, perhaps with some
memory of Ovid in his inind, derives the Irish mainly from the
Scythians.

SPENSER 287

But Spenser was already li\'in5J at Kileolman Cas-
tle (wliioli, with 3,028 acres of land from the for-
feited estates of the Earl of Desmond, was con-
firmed to him by grant two years later), amid
scenery at once placid and noble, whose varied
charm he felt profoundly. He could not complain,
with Ovid, —

" Non liber hie alios, non qui mihi commodet aurem,"

for he was within reach of a cultivated society,
which gave him the stimidus of hearty admiration
both as poet and scholar. Above all, he was fortu-
nate in a seclusion that prompted study and deep-
ened meditation, while it enabled him to converse
with his genius disengaged from those worldly in-
fluences which would have disenchanted it of its
mystic enthusiasm, if they did not muddle it inglo-
riously away. Surely this sequestered nest was
more congenial to the brooding of those ethereal
visions of the " Faery Queen " and to giving his
" soul a loose " than

" The smoke, the wealth, and noise of Rome,
And all the busy pageantry
That wise men scorn and fools adore."

Yet he longed for London, if not with the home-
sickness of Bussy-Rabutin in exile from the Paris-
ian sun, yet enough to make liim jo}^ully accom-
pany Raleigh thither in the early winter of 1589,
carrying with him the first three books of the great
poem begun ten years before. Horace's nonum
prematur in annum had been more than complied
with, and the success was answerable to the well-

288 SPENSER

seasoned material and conscientious faithfulness of
the work. But Spenser did not stay lon<:^ in Lon-
don to enjoy his fame. Seen close at hand, with
its jealousies, intrigues, and selfish basenesses, the
court had lost the enchantment lent by the distance
of Kilcolman. A nature so prone to ideal contem-
plation as Spenser's would be profoundly shocked
by seeing- too closely the ignoble springs of contem-
poraneous policy, and learning by what paltry
personal motives the noble opportunities of the
world are at any given moment endangered. It is
a sad discovery that history is so mainly made by
ignoble men.

' ' Vide questo globo
Tal ch'ei sorrise del suo vil sembiante."

In his " Colin Clout," written just after his return
to Ireland, he speaks of the court in a tone of con-
temptuous bitterness, in which, as it seems to me,
there is more of the sorrow of disillusion than of
the gall of personal disappointment. He speaks,
so he tells us, —

' ' To warn young- shepherds' wandering wit
Which, through report of that life's painted bliss,
Abandon qniet home to seek for it
And leave their lambs to loss misled amiss ;
For, sooth to say, it is no sort of life
For shepherd fit to live in that same place,
Where each one seeks with malice and with strife
To thrust down other into foul disgrace
Himself to raise ; and he doth soonest rise
That best can handle his deceitful wit
In subtle shifts . . .

To which him needs a guileful hollow heart
Masked witli fair dissembling courtesy,
A filed tongue furnisht with terms of art,

SPENSER 289

No art of seliool, but courtiei-s' sclioolery.

For arts of school have there small eounteaance,

Counted but toys to busy idle brains,

And there professors find small maintenance,

But to be instruments of others' jjains,

Nor is there place for any gentle wit

Unless to please it can itself apply.

Even such is all their vaunted vanity,

Naught else but smoke that passeth soon away.

So they themselves for praise of fools do sell,
And all their wealth for painting on a wall.

Whiles single Truth and simple Honesty
Do wander up and down despised of all." ^

And again in his " Mother Hubberd's Tale,"
in the most pithy and masculine verses he ever
wrote : —

" Most miserable man, whom wicked Fate
Hath brought to Court to sue for Had-I-wist
That few have found and many one hath mist!
Full little knowest thou that hast not tried
What hell it is in suing long to bide ;
To lose good days that might be better spent,
To waste long nights in pensive discontent,
To speed to-day, to be put back to-morrow.
To feed on hope, to pine with fear and sorrow,
To have thy prince's grace yet want her Peers',
To have thy asking yet wait many years.
To fret thy soul with crosses and with cares.
To eat thy heart through comfortless despairs,
To fawn, to crouch, to wait, to ride, to run.
To spend, to give, to want, to be undone.

Whoever leaves sweet home, where mean estate
In safe assurance, without strife or hate,

1 Compare Shakespeare's LXVI. Sonnet.

290 SPENSER

Finds all things needful for contentment meek,
And will to court for shadows vain to seek,

That curse God send unto mine enemy ! •' ^

When Spenser had once got safely back to the
secure retreat and serene companionship of his
great poem, with what profound and pathetic exul-
tation must he have recalled the verses of Dante !

" Chi dietro a jura, e chi ad aforismi
Sen giva, e chi seguendo sacerdozio,
E chi regnar per forza e per sofismi,
E chi rubare, e chi civil negozio,
Chi nei diletti della came involto
S' affaticava, e clii si dava all' ozio,
Quando da tutte queste cose sciolto,
Con Beatrice m' era suso in cielo
Cotanto gloriosamente accolto." '^

What Spenser says of the indifference of the
court to learning and literature is the more remark-
able because he himself was by no means an un-
successfid suitor. Queen Elizabeth bestowed on
him a pension of fifty pounds, and shortly after he
received the grant of lands already mentioned. It
is said, indeed, that Lord Burleigh in some way

^ This poem, published in 1591, was, Spenser tells us in his
dedication, "long sithens composed in the raw conceit of my
youth." But he had evidently retouched it. The verses quoted
show a firmer hand than is generally seen in it, and we are safe in
assuming that they were added after his visit to England. Dr.
Johnson epigrammatized Spenser's indictment into

" There mark what ills the scholar's life assail.
Toil, envy, want, the patron, and the jail,"

but I think it loses in pathos more than it gains in point.

- Paradiso, XI. 4-12. Spenser was familiar with the Divina
Commedia, though I do not remember that his commentators havj
pointed out his chief obligations to it.

SPENSER 291

hindered the advaneeineut of the poet, who more
than once directly alhidcs to him either in reproach
or remonstrance. In " The Kuins of Time," after
speaking of the death of Walsingham,

"Since whose decease learuing lies unregarded,
And men of anues do wander unrewarded,'

he gives the following reason for their neglect : —

" For he that now wields all things at his will.
Scorns th' one and th" other in his deeper skill.
O grief of griefs ! O gall of all good hearts.
To see that virtue should despised he
Of him that first was raised for virtuous parts,
And now, broad-spreading like an aged tree,
Lets none shoot up that nigh him planted he :
O let the man of whom the Muse is scorned
Nor live nor dead he of the Muse adorned ! "

And in the introduction to the fourth book of the
" Faery Queen," he says again : —

" The rugged forehead that with grave foresight
Wields kingdoms' causes and affairs of state,
My looser rhymes, I wot, doth sharply wite
For praising Love, as I have done of late, —

By which frail youth is oft to folly led

Through false allurement of that pleasing bait,

That better were in virtues discipled

Than with vain poems' weeds to have their fancies fed.

"Such ones ill judge of love that cannot love
Nor in their frozen hearts feel kindly flame ;
Forthy they ought not thing unknown reprove,
Ne natural affection faultless blame
For fault of few that have abused the same :
For it of honor and all virtue is
The root, and brings forth glorious flowers of fame
That crown tr.:o lovers with immortal bliss,
The meed of them that love and do not live amiss."

292 SPENSER

If Lord Burleigh could not relish such a dish of
nightingales' tongues as the "Faery Queen," he
is very much more to be pitied than Spenser. The
sensitive purity of the poet miglit indeed well be
wounded when a poem in which he proposed to
himself "to discourse at large" of "the ethick part
of Moral Philosoj^hy " ^ could be so misinterpreted.
But Spenser speaks in the same strain and without
any other than a general application in his " Tears
of the Muses," and his friend Sidney undertakes
the defence of poesy because it was undervalued.
But undervalued by whom ? By the only persons
about whom he knew or cared anything, those
whom we should now call Society and who were
then called the Court. The inference I would draw
is that, among the causes which contributed to the
marvellous efflorescence of genius in the last quar-
ter of the sixteenth century, the influence of direct
patronage from above is to be reckoned at almost
nothing,'-^ Then, as when the same phenomenon

^ His own words as reported by Lodowick Bryskett. (Todd's
Spenser, I. Ix. ) The whole passage is very interesting- as giving
lis the only glimpse we get of the living Spenser in actual contact
with his fellow-men. It shows him to us, as we could wish to see
him, surrounded with loving respect, companionable and helpful.
Bryskett tells us that he was " perfect in the Greek tongue," and
'■ also very well read in philosophy both moral and natural.'' lie
encouraged Bryskett in the study of Greek, and offered to help
him in it. Comparing the last verse of the above citation of the
Faery Queen with other passages in Spenser, I cannot help think-
ing that he wrote, " do not love amiss."

" And know, sweet prince, when you shall come to know,

That 't is not in the power of kings to raise

A spirit for verse that is not born thereto ;

Nor are they born in every prince's daj'S."

Daniel's Dedic. Trag. of rhilota:>.

SPENSER 293

has happened elsewhere, there must have been a
sympathetic public. Literature, properly so called,
draws its sap from the deep soil of human nature's
common and everlasting sympathies, the gathered
leaf-mould of countless generations (^oirj irep <f>vX\wv
yercj/), and not from any top-dressing capriciously
scattered over the surface at some master's bid-
ding.^ England had long been growing more trvdy
insular in language and political ideas when the
Keformation came to precipitate her national con-
sciousness by secluding her more completely from
the rest of Europe. Hitherto there had been Eng-
lishmen of a distinct type enough, honestly hating
foreigners, and reigned over by kings of whom
they were proud or not as the case might be, but
there was no England as a separate entity from
the sovereign who embodied it for the time being.^
But now an English people began to be dimly
aware of itself. Their having got a religion to
themselves must have intensified them much as
the having a god of their own did the Jews. The

^ Louis XIV. is commonly supposed in some miraculous way to
have created French literatiire. He may more truly be said to
have petrified it so far as his influence went. The French re-
naissance in the preceding century was produced by causes similar
in essentials to those which brought about that in England not
long after. The grand siecle grew by natural processes of devel-
opment out of that which had preceded it, and which, to the
impartial foreigner at least, has more flavor, and more French
flavor too, than the Gallo-Roman usurper that pushed it from its
stool. The best modern French poetry has been forced to temper
its verses in the colder natural springs of the ante-classic period.

^ In the Elizabethan drama, the words "England " and
"France" are constantly used to signify the king^ of those
countries.

294 SPENSER

exhilaration of relief after the long tension of anx-
iety, when the Spanish Armada was overwhelmed
like the hosts of Pharaoh, while it confirmed their
assurance of a provincial deity, must also have
been like sunshine to bring into flower all that
there was of imaginative or sentimental in the
English nature, already just in the first flush of its
spring.

( ' ' The yonge sonne
Had in the Bull half of his course yronne.")

And just at this moment of blossoming every breeze
was dusty with the golden pollen of Greece, Rome,
and Italy. If Keats could say, when he first
opened Chapman's Homer, —

" Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken ;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He stared at the Pacific, and all his men
Looked at each other with a wild surmise,"

if Keats could say this, whose mind had been un-
consciously fed with the results of this culture, —
results that permeated all thought, all literature,
and all talk, — fancy what must have been the
awakening shock and impulse communicated to
men's brains by the revelation of this new world of
thought and fancy, an unveiling gradual yet sud-
den, like that of a great organ, which discovered
to them what a wondrous instrument was in the
soul of man with its epic and lyric stops, its deep
thunders of tragedy and its passionate vox Jiumana !
It might almost seem as if Shakespeare had typified
all this in Miranda, when she cries out at first sight
of the king and his courtiers,

SPENSER 295

" O, wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here I
How beauteous muukiud is ! O, brave new world
That hath such people in 't I "

The civil wars of the Roses had been a barren
period in English literature, because they had been
merely dynastic squabbles, in which no great prin-
ciples were involved which could shake all minds
with controversy and heat them to intense convic-
tion. A conflict of opposing ambitions wears out
the moral no less than the material forces of a
people, but the ferment of hostile ideas and convic-
tions may realize resources of character which
before were only jjotential, may transform a merely
gregarious multitude into a nation proud in its
strength, sensible of the dignity and duty which
strength involves, and groping after a common
ideal. Some such transformation had been wrought
or was going on in England. For the first time a
distinct image of her was disengaging itself from
the tangled blur of tradition and association in the
minds of her children, and it was now only that her
great poet could speak exultingly to an audience
that would understand him with a passionate sym-
pathy, of

' ' This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in a silver sea.
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England,
This land of such dear souls, this dear, dear land,
England, bound in with the triumphant sea ! "

Such a period can hardly recur again, but some-
thing like it, something pointing back to similar
producing causes, is observable in the revival of

296 SPENSER

English imaginative literature at the close of the
last and in the early years of the present century.
Again, after long fermentation, there was a war of
principles, again the national consciousness was
heightened and stung by a danger to the national
existence, and again there was a crop of great poets
and heroic men.

Spenser once more visited England, bringing
with him three more books of the " Faery Queen,"
in 1595. He is supposed to have remained there
during the two following years.^ In 1594 he had
been married to the lady celebrated in his some-
what artificial amoretti. By her he had four chil-
dren. He was now at the height of his felicity ;
by universal acclaim the first poet of his age, and
the one obstacle to his material advancement (if
obstacle it was) had been put out of the way by
the death of Lord Burleigh, August, 1598. In the
next month he was recommended in a letter from
Queen Elizabeth for the shrievalty of the county
of Cork. But alas for Polycrates ! In October
the wild kerns and gallowglasses rose in no mood
for sparing the house of Pindarus. They sacked
and burned his castle, from which he with his wife
and children barely escaped.^ He sought shelter

^ I say supposed, for the names of his two sons, Sylvanus and
Peregrine, indicate that they were born in Irehmd, and that Spen-
ser continued to regard it as a -wilderness and his abode there as
exile. The two other children are added on the authority of a
pedigree drawn up by Sir W. Betham and cited in Mr. Hales's
Life of Spenser prefixed to the Globe edition.

- Ben Jonson told Drummond that one child perished in th«
flames. But he was speaking after an interval of twentj'-one

SPENSER 297

in London, and died tliere on the 16th Janxiary,
1599, at a tavern in King Street, Westminster.
He was buried in the neighboring Abbey next to
Chaucer, at the cost of the Earl of Essex, poets
bearing his pall and casting verses into his grave.
He died poor, but not in want. On the whole, his
life may be reckoned a happy one, as in the main
the lives of the great poets must have commonly
been. If they feel more passionately the pang of
the moment, so also the compensations are incalcu-
lable, and not the least of them this very capacity
of passionate emotion. The real good fortune is to
be measured, not by more or less of outward pros-
years, and, of course, from hearsay. Spenser's misery was exag-
gerated by succeeding poets, who used him to point a moral, and
from the shelter of his tomb launched many a shaft of sarcasm at
an unappreciative public. Giles Fletcher in his Purple Island
(a poem which reminds us of the Faery Queen by the supreme
tediousness of its allegory, but in nothing else) set the example in
the best verse he ever wrote : —

" Poorly, poor man, he lived ; poorly, poor man, he died."
Gradually this poetical tradition established itself firmly as au-
thentic history. Spenser could never have been poor, except by
comparison. The whole story of his later days has a strong savor
of legend. He must have had ample warning of Tyrone's rebel-
lion, and would probably have sent away his wife and children to
Cork, if he did not go thither himself. I am inclined to think
that he did, carrying his papers with him, and among them the
two cantos of Mutability, first published in Kill. These, it is
most likely, were the only ones he ever completed, for, \vith all
his abundance, he was evidently a laborious finisher. \VTien we
remember that ten years were given to the elaboration of the first
three books, and that five more elapsed before the next three were
ready, we shall waste no vain regrets on the six concluding books
supposed to have been lost by the carelessness of an imaginary
servant on their way from Ireland.

298 SPENSER

perity, but by the opportunity given for the devel-
opment and free play of the genius. It should be
remembered that the power of expression which
exaggerates their griefs is also no inconsiderable
consolation for them. We should measure what
Spenser says of his worldly disappointments by the
bitterness of the unavailing tears he shed for Rosa-
linde. A careful analysis of these leaves no per-
ceptible residuum of salt, and we are tempted to
believe that the passion itself was not much more
real than the pastoral accessories of jiipe and crook.
I very much doubt whether Spenser ever felt more
than one profound passion in his life, and that
luckily was for his " Faery Queen." He was for-
tunate in the friendship of the best men and women
of his time, in the seclusion which made him free
of the still better society of the past, in the loving
recognition of his countrymen. All that we know
of him is amiable and of good report. He was
faithful to the friendships of his youth, pure in his
loves, unspotted in his life. Above all, the ideal
with him was not a thing apart and unattainable,
but the sweetener and ennobler of the street and
the fireside.

There are two ways of measuring a poet, either
by an absolute aesthetic standard, or relatively to
his position in the literary history of his country
and the conditions of his generation. Both should
be borne in mind as coefficients in a perfectly fair
judgment. If his positive merit is to be settled ir-
revocably by the former, yet an intelligent criticism
will find its advantage not only in considering what

SPENSER 299

he was, but what, under the given circumstances,
it was possible for him to be.

The fact that the great poem of Spenser was in-
spired by the OrLando of Ariosto, and written in
avowed emulation of it, and that the poet almost
always needs to have liis fancy set agoing by the
hint of some predecessor, must not lead us to over-
look his manifest claim to originality. It is not
what a poet takes, but what he makes out of what
he has taken, that shows what native force is in
him. Above all, did his mind dwell complacently
in those forms and fashions which in their very
birth are already obsolescent, or was it instinctively
drawn to those qualities which are permanent in
language and whatever is wrought in it? There
is much in Spenser that is contemporary and eva-
nescent ; but the substance of him is durable, and
his work was the deliberate result of intelligent
purpose and ample culture. The publication of
his " Shepherd's Calendar " in 1579 (though the
poem itself be of little interest) is one of the epochs
in our literature. Spenser had at least the origi-
nality to see clearly and to feel keenly that it was
essential to bring poetry back again to some kind
of understanding with nature. His immediate pre-
decessors seem to have conceived of it as a kind
of bird of paradise, born to float somewhere be-
tween heaven and earth, with no very well defined
relation to either. It is true that the nearest ap-
proach they were able to make to this airy ideal
was a shuttlecock, winged with a bright plume or
80 from Italy, but, after all, nothing but cork and

300 SPENSER

feathers, which they bandied back and forth from
one stanza to another, with the useful ambition of
helping it up as long as they could. To my mind
the old comedy of " Gammer Gurton's Needle "
is worth the whole of them. It may be coarse,
earthy, but in reading it one feels that he is at
least a man among men, and not a humbug among
humbugs.

The form of Spenser's " Shepherd's Calendar,"
it is true, is artificial, absurdly so if you look at it
merely from the outside, — not, perhaps, the wisest
way to look at anything, unless it be a jail or a
volume of the " Congressional Globe," — but the
spirit of it is fresh and original. We have at last
got over the superstition that shepherds and shep-
herdesses are any wiser or simpler than other peo-
ple. We know that wisdom can be won only by
wide commerce with men and books, and that sim-
plicity, whether of manners or style, is the crowning
result of the highest culture. But the pastorals of
Spenser were very different things, different both in
the moving spirit and the resultant form from the
later ones of Browne or the " Piscatory Eclogues "
of Phinehas Fletcher. And why ? BrowTie and
Fletcher wrote because Spenser had ^vl•itten, but
Spenser wrote from a strong inward impulse — an
instinct it might be called — to escape at all risks
into the fresh air from that horrible atmosphere into
which rhymer after rhymer had been pumping car-
bonic-acid gas with the full force of his lungs, and
in which all sincerity was on the edge of suffocation.
His longing for something truer and better was as

SPENSER 301

honest as that which led Tacitus so long before to
idealize the Germans, and Rousseau so Ions: after
to make an angvl of the savage.

Spenser himself supremely overlooks the whole
chasm between himself and Chaucer, as Dante be-
tween himself and Virgil. He called Chaucer mas-
ter, as Milton was afterwards to call hhn. And,
even while he chose the most artificial of all forms,
his aim — that of getting back to nature and life —
was conscious, I have no doubt, to himseK, and
must be obvious to whoever reads with an}i;hing
but the ends of his fingers. It is true that Sannaz-
zaro had brought the j)astoral into fashion again,
and that two of Spenser's are little more than
translations from Marot ; but for manner he in-
stinctively turned back to Chaucer, the first and
then only great English poet. He has given com-
mon instead of classic names to his personages,
for characters they can hardly be called. Above
all, he has gone to the provincial dialects for words
wherewith to enlarge and freshen his poetical vo-
cabulary .^ I look upon the " Shepherd's Calen-

^ Sir Philip Sidney did not approve of this. " That same fram-
ing of his style to an old rustic language I dare not allow, since
neither Theocritus in Greek, Virgil in Latin, nor Sannazzaro in
Italian did affect it." (Defence of Poesy.) Ben Jonson, on tlie
other hand, said that Guarini ' ' kept not decorum in making
shepherds speak as well as himself could." (Conversations with
Drummond.) I think Sidney was right, for the poets' Arcadia
is a purely ideal world, and should be treated accordingly. But
•whoever looks into the glossary appended to the Calendar by
E. K., will be satisfied that Spenser's object was to find unhack-
neyed and poetical words rather than such as should seem more on
a level with the speakers. See also the Epistle Dedicatory. I
cannot help thinking that E. K. was Spenser himself, with occa-

302 SPENSER

dar " as being no less a conscious and deliberate at-
tempt at reform than Thomson's " Seasons " were
in the topics, and AVordsworth's " Lja-ical Ballads '*
in the language of poetry. But the great merit
of these pastorals was not so much in their mat-
ter as their manner. They show a sense of style
in its larger meaning hitherto disj^layed by no
English poet since Chaucer. Surrey had brought
back from Italy a certain inkling of it, so far as
it is contained in decorum. But here was a new
language, a choice and arrangement of words, a
variety, elasticity, and harmony of verse most
gi '^tef ul to the ears of men. K not passion, there
was fervor, which was perhaps as near it as the
somewhat stately movement of Spenser's mind
would allow him to come. Sidney had tried many
experiments in versification, which are curious and
interesting, especially his attempts to naturalize the
sliding rhymes of Sannazzaro in English. But
there is everywhere the uncertainty of a 'prentice
hand. Spenser shows himself already a master, at
least in verse, and we can trace the studies of Mil-
ton, a yet gi'eater master, in the " Shepherd's Cal-
endar " as well as in the " Faery Queen." We
have seen that Spenser, under the misleading in-
fluence of Sidney ^ and Harvey, triect his hand at
English hexameters. But his great glory is that
he taught his own language to sing and move to
measm'es harmonious and noble. Chaucer had

sional interjections of Harvey. Who else could have -written such
English as many passages in this Epistle ?

1 It was at Penshurst that he wrote the only specimen that has
come down to us, and bad enough it is. I have said that some of
Sidney's are pleasing.

SPENSER 303

done much to vocalize it, as I have tried to show
elsewhere,^ but Spenser was to prove

" That no tonn^ue hath the muse's utterance heired
For verse, and that sweet music to the ear
Struck out of rhyme, so naturally as this."

The " Shepherd's Calendar " contains perhaps the
most picturesquely imaginative verse which Spen-
ser has written. It is in the eclogue for February,
where he tells us of the

"Faded oak

Whose hody is sere, whose hranches hroke,
Whose naked arms stretch unto the fire."

It is one of those verses that Joseph Warton would
have liked in secret, that Dr. Johnson woidd have
proved to be untranslatable into reasonable prose,
and which the imagination welcomes at once with-
out caring whether it be exactly conformable to
harhara or celarent. Another pretty verse in the
same eclogue,

" But gently took that ungently came,"

pleased Coleridge so greatly that he thought it was
his own. But in general it is not so much the sen-
timents and images that are new as the modula-
tion of the verses in which they float. The cold
obstruction of two centuries thaws, and the sti*eam
of speech once more let loose, seeks out its old
windings, or overflows musically in unpractised
channels. The service which Spenser did to our
literature by this exquisite sense of harmony is in-
calculable. His fine ear, abhorrent of barbarous
dissonance, his dainty tongue that loves to prolong
^ See Literary Essays, iii. 33S seqq.

304 SPENSER

the relish of a musical phrase, made possible the
transition from the cast-iron stiffness of " Ferrex
and Porrex " to the Damascus pliancy of Fletcher
and Shakespeare. It was he that

" Tauglit the dumb on high to sing,
And heavy ignorance aloft to fly :
That added feathers to the learned's wing,
And gave to grace a double majesty."

I do not mean that in the " Shepherd's Calen-
dar " he had already achieved that ti*ansmutation
of language and metre by which he was afterwards
to endow English verse with the most varied and
majestic of stanzas, in which the droning old
alexandrine, awakened for the first time to a feel-
ing of the poetry that was in him, was to wonder,
like M. Jourdain, that he had been talking prose
all his life, — but already he gave clear indications
of the tendency and premonitions of the power
which were to carry it forward to ultimate perfec-
tion. A harmony and alacrity of language like
this were unexampled in English verse : —

" Ye dainty nymphs, that in this blessed brook

Do bathe your breast,
Forsake your watery bowers and hither look

At my request. . . .
And eke you virgins that on Pamass dwell,
Whence floweth Helicon, the learned well,

Help me to blaze

Her worthy praise,
Wliich in her sex doth all excel."

Here we have the natural gait of the measure, some-
what formal and slow, as befits an invocation , and
now mark how the same feet shall be made to
(piicken their pace at the bidding of the tune : —

SPENSER 306

" Bring: liere the pink and purple columbine,

With gilliflowers ;
Bring; coronations and sops in wine,

Worne of paranioiu's ;
Strow me the gi-ouud with daffadowndillies,
And cowslips and kingcdps and loved lilies ;

The pretty paunce

And the elievisauce
Shall match with the fair flowerdelice." ^

The argument prefixed by E. K. to the tenth
Eclogue has a special interest for us as showing
how high a conception Spenser had of poetry and
the poet's office. By Cuddy he evidently means
himself, though choosing out of modesty another

^ Of course dillies and lilies must be read with a slight accen-
tuation of the last syllable (permissible then), iu order to chime
■with delice. In the fii-st line I have put here instead of hether,
■which (like other words where th comes between two vowels) was
then very often a monosyllable, iu order to throw the accent back
more strongly on bring, where it belongs. Spenser's innovation
lies in making his verses by ear instead of on the finger-tips, and
in valuing the stave more than any of the single verses that
compose it. This is the secret of his easy superiority to all others
in the stanza which he composed, and which bears his name. Mil-
ton (who got more of his schooling in these matters from Spenser
than anywhere else) gave this principle a greater range, and ap-
plied it ■with more various mastery. I have little doubt that the
tune of the last stanza cited above was clinging in Shakespeare's
ear when he wrote those exquisite verses in Midsummer Night's
Dream ("I know a bank"), where our grave pentameter is in
like manner surprised into a lyrical movement. See also the
pretty song in the eclogue for August. Ben Jonson, too, evi-
dently caught some cadences from Spenser for his lyrics. I need
hardly say that in those eclogues (May, for example) where Spen-
ser thought he was imitating what wiseacres used to call the rid-
ing-rhyme of Chaucer, he fails most lamentably. He bad evidently
learned to scan his master's verses better when he wrote his Mother
Hubberd's Tale.

o06 SPENSER

name instead of the familiar Colin. " In Cuddy
is set forth the perfect pattern of a Poet, which,
finding no maintenance of his state and studies,
complaineth of the contempt of Poetry and the
causes thereof, specially having been in all ages,
and even amongst the most barbarous, always of
singular account and honor, and being indeed so
worthy and commendable an art^ or rather no art,
hut a divine gift and heavenly instinct not to he
gotten by labor and learning, but adorned ivith
both, and poured into the wit by a certain Enthoii-
siasmos and celestial inspiration^ as the author
hereof elsewhere at large discourseth in his book
called The English Poet, which book being
lately come into my hands, I mind also by God's
grace, upon further advisement, to publish." E. K.,
whoever he was, never carried out his intention,
and the book is no doubt lost ; a loss to be borne
with less equanimity than that of Cicero's treatise
De Gloria^ once possessed by Petrarch. The pas-
sage I have italicized is most likely an extract, and
reminds one of the long-breathed jieriods of Milton.
Drummond of Hawthoi'nden tells us, " he [Ben
JonsonJ hath by heart some verses of Spenser's
' Calendar,' about wine, between Coline and Per-
cye " (Cuddie and Piers). ^ These verses are in
this eclogue, and are worth quoting both as having
the approval of dear old Ben, the best critic of the
day, and because they are a good sample of Spen-
ser's earlier verse : —

^ Dnimmond, it will be remarked, speaking from memory, takes
Cuddy to be Colin. In Milton's Lycidas there are reminiscences

SPENSER 307

■' Tliou kenst not, Percie, liow the rhrme should rage ;
O. if my teniplps were distained witli wine,
And girt in g-arlands of wild ivy-twine,
How I could rear the Muse on stately stiige

And teach her tread aloft in buskin fine
With quaint Bellona in her equipage ! "

In this eclogue he gives hints of that spacious
style which was to distinguish him, and which, like
his own Fame,

" With golden wings aloft doth fly
Above the reach of ruinous decay,
And with brave plumes doth beat the azure sky,
Admired of base-bom men from far away." ^

He was letting his wings grow, as Milton said, and

foreboding the " Faery Queen " : —

of this eclogue as well as of that for May. The latter are the
more evident, but I think that Spenser's

" Cuddie, the praise is better than the price,"
suggested Milton's

' ' But not the praise,
Phoebus replied, and touched my trembling ears."
Shakespeare had read and remembered this pastoral. Compare

" But, all, Maecenas is yelad in clay,
And great Augustus long ago is dead.
And all the worthies liggen wrapt in lead,"
with

" King Pandion, he is dead ;

All thy friends are lapt in lead."

It is odd that Shakespeare, in his " /apt in /ead," is more Speu-
serian than Spenser himself, from whom he caught this " hunting
of the letter."

^ Ruins of Time. It is perhaps not considering too nicely
to remark how often this image of wings recurred to Spenser's
mind. A certain aerial latitude was essential to the large circlings
of his style.

308 SPENSER

" Lift thyself up out of the lowly dust

To 'doubted knights whose woundless armor rusts
And helms unbruis(5d waxen daily brown :
There may thy Muse display her flutterinfr 'wing,
And stretch herself at large from East to West.''

Verses like these, especially the last (which Dry den
would have liked), were such as English ears
had not yet heard, and curiously prophetic of the
maturer man. The language and verse of Spen-
ser at his best have an ideal lift in them, and there
is scarce any of our poets who can so hardly help
being poetical.

It was this instantly felt if not easily definable
charm that forthwith won for Spenser his never-
disputed rank as the chief English poet of that
age, and gave him a popularity which, during his
life and in the following generation, was, in its
select quality, without a competitor. It may be
thought that I lay too much stress on this single
attribute of diction. But apart from its impor-
tance in his case as showing their way to the poets
who were just then learning the accidence of their
art, and leaving them a material to work in already
mellowed to their hands, it should be remembered
that it is subtle perfection of phrase and that
happy coalescence of music and meaning, where
each reinforces the other, that define a man as poet
and make all ears converts and partisans. Spenser
was an epicure in language. He loved " seld-seen
costly " words perhaps too well, and did not always
distinguish between mere strangeness and that nov-
elty which is so agreeable as to cheat us wath some

SPENSER 309

charm of seeming association. lie had not the con-
centrated power which can sometimes pack infinite
riches in the little room o£ a single epithet, for his
genius is rather for dilation than compression.^
But he was, with the exception of Milton and pos-
sibly Gray, the most learned of our poets. His
familiarity with ancient and modern literature was
easy and intimate, and as he perfected himself in
his art, he cauglit the grand manner and high-bred
ways of the society he frequented. But even to
the last he did not quite shake off the blunt rusti-
city of phrase that was habitual with the genera-
tion that preceded him. In the fifth book of the
" Faery Queen," where he is describing the passion
of Britomart at the supposed infidelity of ^\i-the-
gall, he descends to a Teniers-like realism,^ — he

^ Perhaps his most striking single epithet is the " sea-shoulder-
ing whales," B. II. 12, xxiii. His ear seems to delight in prolon-
gations. For example, he makes such words as glorious, gratious,
joyeous, havior, chapelet dactyles, and that, not at the end of
verses, where it would not have been unusual, but in the first
half of them. Milton contrives a break (a kind of heave, as it
■were) in the uniformity of his verse by a practice exactly the op-
posite of this. He also shuns a hiatus which does not seem to
have been generally displeasing to Spenser's ear, though perhaps
in the compound epithet bees-alluring he intentionally avoids it by
the plural form.

- " Like as a wayward chUd, whose sounder sleep
Is broken with some fearful dream's affright,
With froward will doth set himself to weep
Ne can be stilled for all his nurse's might,
But kicks and squalls and shrieks for fell despight.
Now scratching her and her loose locks misusing.
Now seeking darkness and now seeking light.
Then craving suck, and then the suck refusing."
He would doubtless have justified liimself by the familiar

310 SPENSER

whose verses generally remind ixs of the dancing
Hours of Guido, where we catch but a glimpse of
the real earth and that far away beneath. But
his habitual style is that of gracious loftiness and
refined luxury.

He fust shows his mature hand in the " Muiopot-
mos," the most airily fancifid of his poems, a mar-
vel for delicate conception and treatment, whose
breezy verse seems to float between a blue sky and
golden earth in imperishable sunshine. Xo other
English poet has found the variety and compass
which enlivened the octave stanza under his sensi-
tive touch. It can hardly be doubted that in Cla-
rion the butterfly he has s^onbohzed himseK, and
surely never was the poetic temperament so pictur-
esquely exemplified : —

" Over the fields, in his frank lustiness,
And all the champaign o'er, he soared light,
And all the country wide he did possess.
Feeding upon their pleasures bounteously,
That none gainsaid and none did him envy.

" The woods, the rivers, and the meadows green.
With his air-cutting wings he measured wide,
Nor did he leave the mountains hare unseen,
Nor the rank grassy fens' delights untried ;
But none of these, however sweet they been,
Mote please his fancy, or him cause to abide ;
His choicef ul sense with every change doth flit ;
No common things may please a wavering wit.

example of Homer's comparing Ajax to a donkey in the eleventh
book of the Iliad. So also in the Epithalamion it grates our nerves
to hear,

" Pour not by cups, but by the bellyful,
Pour out to all that wull."
Such examples serve to show how strong a dose of Spenser's ait-
rum potabile the language needed.

SPENSER 31 1

" To the gray gardens his unstaid desire

flim -wholly carried, to refresh his sprights ;
There la%'ish Nature, in her best attire,
Pours forth sweet odoi-s and alluring sights,
And Art, with her contendinyf doth aspire,
To excel the natural with made delights ;
And all that fair or pleasant may be found,
In riotous excess doth there abound.

" There he arri^-ing, round about doth flie,
From bed to bed, from one to the other border,
And takes survey with curious busy eye,
Of every flower and herb there set in order,
Now this, now that, he tasteth tenderly.
Yet none of them he rudely doth disorder,
Ne with his feet their silken leaves displace,
But pastures on the pleasures of each place.

" And evermore with most variety
And change of sweetness (for all change is sweet)
He casts his glutton sense to satisfy.
Now sucking of the sap of herbs most meet.
Or of the dew which yet on them doth lie.
Now in the same bathing his tender feet ;
And then he percheth on some branch thereby
To weather him and his moist wings to dry.

" And then again he turneth to his play.
To spoil [plunder] the pleasures of that paradise ;
The wholesome sage, the lavender still gray.
Rank-smelling rue, and cummin good for eyes.
The roses reigning in the pride of May,
Sharp hyssop good for green wounds' remedies,
Fair marigolds, and bees-alluring thyme,
Sweet marjoram and daisies decking prime,

" Cool Tiolets, and orpine growing still,
Embathed balm, and cheerful galingale,
Fresh costmary and breathful eamoniill.
Dull poppy and drink-quickening setuale.
Vein-healing vervain and head-purging dill,

312 SPENSER

Sound savory, and basil liearty-hale,
Fat coleworts and comforting perseline,
Cold lettuce, and refreshing rosemarine.^

" And whatso else of virtue good or ill,
Grew in this garden, fetched from far away,
Of every one he takes and tastes at •will,
And on their pleasures greedily doth prey ;
Then, when he hath both played and fed his fill.
In the warm sun he doth himself embay.
And there him rests in riotous suffisance
Of all his gladfidness and kingly joyance.

" What more felicity can fall to creature
Than to enjoy delight with liberty,
And to be lord of all the works of nature ?
To reigii in the air from earth to highest sky.
To feed on flowers and weeds of glorious feature,
To take whatever thing doth please the eye ?
Who rests not pleased with such happiness,
Well worthy he to taste of wretchedness."

Tlie " Muiopotinos " pleases us all the more that
it vibrates in us a string of classical association by
adding an ejiisode to Ovid's story of Arachne.
'" Talking the other day with a friend (the late
Mr. Keats) about Dante, he observed that when-
ever so great a poet told us anything in addition or
continuation of an ancient story, he had a right to
be regarded as classical authority. For instance,
said he, when he tells us of that characteristic
death of Ulysses, ... we ought to receive the in-

^ I could not bring myself to root out this odorous herb-garden,
though it make my extract too long. It is a pretty reminiscence
of his master Chaucer, but is also very characteristic of Spenser
himself. He could not help planting a flower or two among his
serviceable plants, and after all this abundance he is not satisfied,
but begins the next stanza with " And whatso else."

SPENSER 313

formation as authentic, and be glad that we have
more news of Ulysses than we looked for." ^ We
can hardly doubt that Ovid would have been glad
to admit this exquisitely fantastic illumination into
his margin.

No German anah'zer of aesthetics has given ns so
con\nncing a definition of the artistic nature as
these radiant verses. " To reign in the air " was
certainly Spenser's function. And yet the com-
mentators, who seem never willing to let their poet
be a poet pure and simple, though, had he not been
so, they would have lost their only hold upon life,
try to make out from his '• Mother Hubberd's
Tale " that he might have been a very sensible
matter-of-fact man if he would. For my own part,
I am quite willing to confess that I like liim none
the worse for being unpractical, and that my read-
ing has convinced me that being too poetical is the
rarest fault of poets. Practical men are not so
scarce, one would think, and I am not sure that
the tree was a gainer when the hamadryad flitted
and left it nothing but ship-timber. Such men as
Spenser are not sent into the woi'ld to be part of
its motive power. The blind old engine would not
know the difference though we got up its steam
with attar of roses, nor make one revolution more
to the minute for it. What practical man ever left
such an heirloom to his countrymen as the " Faery
Queen " ?

Undoubtedly Spenser wished to be useful and in
the highest vocation of all, that of teacher, and

^ Leigh Hunt's Indicator, XVII.

314 SPENSER

Milton calls him " our sage and serious poet, whom
I dare be known to think a better teacher than
Scotus or Aquinas." And good Dr. Henry More
was of the same mind. I fear he makes his vices
so beautiful now and then tliat we should not be
very much afraid of them if we chanced to meet
them ; for he could not escape from his genius,
which, if it led him as philosopher to the abstract
contemplation of the beautiful, left him as poet open
to every impression of sensuous delight. When he
wrote the " Shepherd's Calendar " he was certainly
a Puritan, and probably so by conviction rather
than from any social influences or thought of per-
sonal interests. There is a verse, it is true, in the
second of the two detached cantos of " Mutability,"

" Like that ungracious crew which feigns demurest grace,"

which is supposed to glance at the straiter rehgion-
ists, and from which it has been inferred that he
drew away from them as he grew older. It is very
likely that years and widened experience of men
may have produced in him their natural residt of
tolerant wisdom which revolts at the hasty destruc-
tiveness of inconsiderate zeal. But with the more
generous side of Puritanism I think he sympa-
thized to the last. His rebukes of clerical world-
liness are in the Puritan tone, and as severe a one
as any is in " Mother Hubberd's Tale," published
in 1591.^ There is an iconoclastic relish in his

1 Ben Jonson told Drummond " that in that paper Sir W.
Raleigh had of the allegories of his Faery Queen, hy the Blatant
Beast the Puritans were understood." But this is certainly wrong
There were very different shades of Puritanism, according to in-

SPENSER 315

account of Sir Guyon's denioHshing the Bower of
Bliss that makes us think he would not have re-
gretted the plundered abbeys as perhaps Shake-
speare did when he speaks of the winter woods
as " bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds
sang " : —

" But all those pleasant bowers and palace brave
GuYon broke down with rigor pitiless,
Ne ought their goodly workmanship might save
Them from the tempest of his wrathfulness,
But that their bliss he turned to balefulness ;
Their groves he felled, their gardens did deface,
Their arbors spoil, their cabinets suppress.
Their banquet-houses burn, their buildings rase,
And of the fairest late now made the foulest place."

But whatever may have been Spenser's religious
opinions (which do not nearly concern us here),
the bent of his mind was toward a Platonic mys-
ticism, a supramundane sphere where it could
shape universal forms out of the primal elements
of things, instead of being forced to put up with
their fortuitous combinations in the unwilling ma-
terial of mortal clay. He who, when his singing
robes were on, could never be tempted nearer to
the real world than under some subterfuge of pas-
toral or allegory, expatiates joyously in this un-
trammelled ether : —

dividual temperament. That of Winthrop and Higginson had a
mellowness of which Endicott and Standish were incapable. The
fvradual change of Milton's opinions was similar to that which I
suppose in Spenser. Tlie passage in Mother Tlubberd may have
been aimed at the Protestant clergy of Ireland (for he says much
the same thing in his View of the State of Ireland ), but it ia gen-
eral in its terms.

816 SPENSER

" Lifting' liimself out of the lowly dust
Ou golden plumes up to the purest sky."

Nowhere does his genius soar and sing with such
continuous aspiration, nowhere is his phrase so
decorously stately, though rising to an enthusiasm
which reaches intensity while it stops short of vehe-
mence, as in his Hymns to Love and Beauty, es-
pecially the latter. There is an exulting spurn of
earth in it, as of a soid just loosed from its cage.
I shall make no extracts from it, for it is one of
those intimately coherent and transcendentally log-
ical poems that " nioveth altogether if it move at
all," the breaking off a fragment from which would
maim it as it would a perfect group of crystals.
Whatever there is of sentiment and passion is for
the most part purely disembodied and without sex,
like that of angels, — a kind of poetry which has
of late gone out of fashion, whether to our gain or
not may be questioned. Perhaps one may venture
to hint that the animal instincts are those that
stand in least need of stimidation. Sj^enser's no-
tions of love were so nobly pure, so far from those
of our common ancestor who could hang by his tail,
as not to disqualify him for achieving the quest of
the Holy Grail, and accordingly it is not uninstruc-
tive to remember that he had drunk, among others,
at French sources not yet deboshed with absinthe?

^ Two of his eclogues, as I have said, are from Marot, and his
earliest known verses are translations from Bellay. a poet wlio
was charming whenever he had the courage to play truant from
a bad school. We must not suppose that an analysis of the liter-
ature of the demi-monde ^vill give us all the elements of the French
character. It has been both grave and profound ; nay, it has even

SPENSER 317

Yet, with a purity like that of thriee-Lolted snow,
he had none of its coldness. He is, of all our poets,
the most truly sensuous, using the word as Milton
probably meant it when he said that poetry shoidd
be " simple, sensuous, and passionate." A poet is
innocently sensuous when his mind permeates and
illumines his senses ; when they, on the other hand,
muddy the mind, he becomes sensual. Every one
of Spenser's senses was as exquisitely alive to the
impressions of material, as every organ of his soul
was to those of spiritual beauty. Accordingly, if
he painted the weeds of sensuality at all, he could
not help making them " of glorious feature." It
was this, it may be suspected, rather than his
"praising love," that made Lord Burleigh shake
his "rugged forehead." Spenser's gamut, indeed,
is a wide one, ranging from a purely corporeal de-
light in "precious odors fetched from far away"
upward to such refinement as

" Upon her eyelids many graces sate
Under the shadow of her even hrows,"

where the eye shares its pleasure with the mind.
He is court-painter in ordinary to each of the senses
In turn, and idealizes these frail favorites of his
majesty King Lusty Juventus, till they half believe
themselves the innocent shepherdesses into which
he travesties them.^

contrived to be wise and lively at the same time, a combination so
incomprehensible by the Teutonic races that they have labelled it
levity. It puts them out as Nature did Fuseli.

^ Taste must be partially excepted. It is remarkable how little
eating and drinking there is in the Faery Queen. The only time
he fairly sets a table is in the house of MalbeccOj where it is

318 SPENSER

In his great poem he had two objects in view :
first, the ephemeral one of pleasing the court, and
then that of recommending himself to the perma-
nent approval of his own and following ages as a
poet, and especially as a moral poet. To meet the
first demand, he lays the scene of his poem in con-
temporary England, and brings in all the leading
personages of the day under the thin disguise of
his knights and their squires and lady-loves. He
says this expressly in the prologue to the second
book : —

" Of Faery Land yet if he more inqiiire,
By certain signs, liere set in sundry place,
He may it find ; . . .
And thou, 0 fairest princess under sky,
In this fair mirror mayst behold thy face
And thine own realms in land of Faery."

Many of his personages we can still identify, and
all of them were once as easily recognizable as
those of Mademoiselle de Scudery. This, no doubt,
added greatly to the immediate piquancy of the
allusions. The interest they would excite may be
inferred from the fact that King James, in 1596,
wished to have the author prosecuted and punished

necessary to the conduct of the story. Yet taste is not wholly

forgotten : —

" In her left hand a cup of gold she held,
And with her right the riper fruit did reach,
Whose sappy liquor, that with fulness sweld.
Into her cup she scruzed with dainty breach
Of her fine fingers without foul impeach.
That so fair wine-press made the wine more sweet."
(B. II. c. xii. 56.)

Taste can hardly complain of unhandsome treatment !

SPENSER 319

for his indecent handling of his mother, Mary
Queen of Sects, under the name of Duessa.^ To
suit the wider api)lieation of his plan's other and
more important half, Spenser made all his charac-
ters double their parts, and appear in his allegory
as the impersonations of abstract moral qualities.
When the cardinal and theological virtues tell
Dante,

" Noi siam qui ninfe e in ciel siamo stelle,"

the sweetness of the verse enables the fancy, by a
slight gulp, to swallow without solution the prob-
lem of being in two places at the same time. But
there is something fairly ludicrous in such a dual-
ity as that of Prince Arthur and the Earl of
Leicester, Arthegall and Lord Grey, and Belphoebe
and Elizabeth,

" In this same interlude it doth befall

That I, one Snout by name, present a wall."

The reality seems to heighten the improbability,
already hard enough to manage. But Spenser
had fortunately almost as little sense of humor as

^ Had the poet lived longer, he might perhaps have verified his
friend Raleigh's saying, that " whosoever in writing modern his-
tory shall follow truth too near the heels, it may haply strike out
his teeth." The passage is one of the very few disgusting ones in
the Faery Queen. Spenser was copying Ariosto ; but the Ital-
ian poet, with the discreeter taste of his race, keeps to generali-
ties. Spenser goes into particulars which can only be called nasty.
He did this, no doubt, to pleasure his mistress, Mary's rival ; and
this gives us a measure of the brutal coarseness of contemporary
manners. It becomes only the more marvellous that the fine
flower of his genius could have transmuted the juices of such a
soil into the purity and sweetness which are its own peculiar prop-
erties.

320 SPENSER

Wordsworth,^ or he could never have carried his
poem on with enthusiastic good faith so far as he
did. It is evident that to liim the Land of Faery
was an unreal world of picture and illusion,

" The -world's sweet inn from pain and -wearisome turmoil,"

in which he could shut himself up from the actual,
with its shortcomings and failures.

" The -ways through wliich my -weary steps I guide
111 this delightful land of Faery
Are so exceeding spacious and -wide,
And sprinkled with such sweet variety
Of all that pleasant is to ear and eye,
That I, nigh ravisht -with rare thoughts' delight,

My tedious travail do forget thereby,
And, -when I 'gin to feel decay of might,
It strength to me supplies, and cheers my dulled spright."

Spenser seems here to confess a little weariness ;
but the alacrity of his mind is so great that, even
where his invention fails a little, we do not share
his feeling nor suspect it, charmed as we are by
the variety and sweep of his measure, the beauty
or vigor of his similes, the musical felicity of his
diction, and the mellow versatility of his pictures.
In this last quality Ariosto, whose emulous pupil he
was, is as Bologna to Venice in the comparison.
That, when the personal allusions have lost their
meaning and the allegory has become a burden, the

^ There is a gleam of humor in one of the couplets of Mother
Uubberd's Tale, -where the Fox, persuading the Ape that they
sliould disguise themselves as discharged soldiers in order to beg
the more successfully, says, —

"Be you the soldier, for you likest are
For manly semblance and small skill in war."

SPENSER 321

book shoulil continue to be read with delight, is

proof enough, were any wanting, how full of life

and light and the other-worldliness of poetry it

must be. As a narrative it has, I think, every

fault of which that kind of writing is capable.

The characters are vague, and, even were they not,

they drop out of the story so often and remain out

of it so long, that we have forgotten who they are

when we meet them again ; the episodes hinder the

advance of the action instead of relieving it with

variety of incident or novelty of situation ; the plot,

if plot it may be called,

' ' That shape has none
Distinguishable in member, joint, or limb,"

recalls drearily our ancient enemy, the Metrical
Romance ; while the fighting, which in those old
poems was tediously sincere, is between shadow
and shadow, where we know that neither can harm
the other, though we are tempted to wish he might.
Hazlitt bids us not mind the allegory, and says
that it won't bite us nor meddle with us if we do
not meddle with it. But how if it bore us, which
after all is the fatal question ? The truth is that
it is too often forced upon us against our will, as
people were formerly driven to church till they be-
gan to look on a day of rest as a penal institution,
and to transfer to the Scriptures that suspicion of
defective inspiration which was awakened in them
by the preaching. The true type of the allegory is
the Odyssey, which we read without suspicion as
pure poem, and then find a new pleasure in divin-
ing its double meaning, as if we somehow got a

322 SPENSER

better bargain of our author than he meant to give
us. But this complex feeling must not be so exact-
ing as to prevent our lapsing into the old Arabian
Nights simplicity of interest again. The moral of
a poem should be suggested, as when in some medi-
eval church we cast down our eyes to muse over a
fresco of Giotto, and are reminded of the transito-
riness of life by the mortuary tablets under our feet.
The vast superiority of Bunyan over Spenser lies
in the fact that we help make his allegory out of
our own experience. Instead of striving to embody
abstract passions and temptations, he has given us
his own in all their pathetic simplicity. He is the
Ulysses of liis own prose-epic. This is the secret
of his power and his charm, that, while the repre-
sentation of what may happen to all men comes
home to none of us in particidar, the story of
any one man's real experience finds its startling
parallel in that of every one of us. The very
homeliness of Bunyan's names and the everyday-
ness of his scenery, too, put us off our guard, and
we soon find ourselves on as easy a footing with
his allegorical beings as we might be with Adam
or Socrates in a dream. Indeed, he has prepared
us for such incongruities by telling us at setting
out that the story was of a dream. The long
nights of Bedford jail had so intensified his imagi-
nation, and made the figures with which it peopled
his solitude so real to him, that the creatures of his
mind become things, as clear to the memory as if
we had seen them. But Spenser's are too often
mere names, with no bodies to back them, entered

SPENSER 323

on the ]Muses' muster-roll by the specious trick of
personification. There is, likewise, in Bunyan, a
childlike simplicity and taking-for-granted which
win our confidence. His Giant Despair,^ for ex-
ample, is by no means the Ossianic figure into
which artists who mistake the vague for the sub-
lime have misconceived it. lie is the ogre of the
fairy-tales, with his malicious wife ; and he comes
forth to us from those regions of early faith and
wonder as something beforehand accepted by the
imagination. These figures of Bunyan's are al-
ready familiar inmates of the mind, and, if there
be any sublimity in him, it is the daring frankness
of his verisimilitude. Spenser's giants are those
of the later romances, except that grand figure
with the balances in the second Canto of Book V.,
the most original of all his conceptions, yet no real
giant, but a pure eidolon of the mind. As Bunyan
rises not seldom to a natural poetry, so Spenser
sinks now and then, through the fault of his topics,
to unmistakable prose. Take his description of the
House of Alma,^ for instance : —

" The master cook was cald Concoction,

A careful man, and full of comely guise ;
The kitchen-clerk, that hight Digestion,
Did order all the achates in seemly wise."

And SO on through all the organs of the body.
The author of Ecclesiastes understood these mat-
ters better in that last pathetic chapter of his, blun-

^ Bunyan probably took the hint of the Giant's suicidal offer
of " knife, halter, or poison," from Spenser's " swords, ropes,
poison," in Faery Queen, B. I. c. ix. 1.

2 Book II. c. 9.

324 SPENSER

deiingly translated as it apparently Is. This, I
admit, is the worst failure of Spenser in this kind ;
though, even here, when he gets on to the organs
of the mind, the enchantments of his fancy and
style come to the rescue and put us in good-humor
again, hard as it is to conceive of armed knights
entering the chamber of the mind, and talking with
such visionary damsels as Ambition and Shame-
fastness. Nay, even in the most prosy parts, un-
less my partiality deceive me, there is an infantile
confidence in the magical powers of Prosopopoeia
which half beguiles us, as of children who play that
everything is something else, and are quite satis-
fied with the transformation.

The problem for Spenser was a double one : how
to commend poetry at all to a generation which
thought it effeminate trifling,^ and how he, Master
Edmund Spenser, of imagination all compact, could
commend his poetry to Master John Bidl, the most
practical of mankind in his habitual mood, but at
that moment in a passion of religious anxiety about
his soul. Omne tulit punchim qui miscuit utile
dulci was not only an irrefragable axiom because a
Latin poet had said it, but it exactly met the case
in point. He would con\'ince the scorners that
poetry might be seriously useful, and show Master
Bull his new way of making fine words butter pars-
nips, in a rhymed moral primer. Allegory, as then
practised, was Imagination adapted for beginners,
in words of one syllable and illustrated with cuts,

^ See Sidney's Defence, and Puttenham's Art of English Poesy,
Book I. c. 8.

SPENSER 325

and would thus serve both his ethieal and pictorial
purpose. Such a primer, or a first instalment of it,
he proceeded to put forth ; but he so bordered it
with bright-colored fancies, he so often filled whole
pages and crowded the text hard in others with the
gay frolics of his pencil, that, as in the Grimani mis-
sal, the holy function of the book is forgotten in the
ecstasy of its adornment. AVorse than all, does not
his brush linger more lovingly along the rosy con-
tours of his sirens than on the modest wimples of
the Wise Virgins ? " The general end of the book,"
he tells us in his Dedication to Sir Walter Raleigh,
" is to fashion a gentleman of noble person in virtu-
ous and gentle discipline." But a little further on
he evidently has a qualm, as he thinks how gener-
ously he had interpreted his promise of cuts : " To
some I know this method will seem displeasant,
which had rather have good discipline delivered
plainly in way of precepts or sermoned at large,^ as
they use, than thus cloudily enwrapped in allegor-
ical devices." Lord Burleigh was of this way of
thinking, undoubtedly, but how could poor Clarion
help it ? Has he not said,

" And whatso else of virtue good or ill,

Grew in this garden, feteht from far away,
Of every one he takes and tastes at will,

And on theii' pleasures greedily doth prey " ?

One sometimes feels in reading him as if he were
the pure sense of the beautifid incarnated to the
one end that he might interpret it to our duller per-

' We can fancy how he would have done this by Jeremy Taylor,
who was a kind of Spenser in a cassock.

326 SPENSER

ceptions. So exquisite was bis sensibility,^ that
with hiin sensation and intellection seem identical,
and we " can almost say his body thought." This
subtle interfusion of sense with spirit it is that
gives his poetry a crystalline purity without lack of
warmth. He is fidl of feeling, and yet of such a
kind that we can neither say it is mere intellectual
perception of what is fair and good, nor yet asso-
ciate it with that throbbing fervor which leads us
to call sensibility by the physical name of heart.

Charles Lamb made the most pithy criticism of
Spenser when he called him the poets' poet. We
may fairly leave the allegory on one side, for per-
haps, after all, he adopted it only for the reason
that it was in fashion, and put it on as he did his
ruif, not because it was becoming, but because it
was the only wear. The true use of him is as a
gallery of pictures which we visit as the mood takes
us, and where we spend an hour or two at a time,
long enough to sweeten our perceptions, not so long
as to cloy them. He makes one think always of
Venice ; for not only is his style Venetian,^ but as

^ Of this he himself gives a striking' hint, where speaking in his
own person he suddenlj' breaks in on his narrative with the pas-
sionate cry,

'' Ah, dearest God, me grant I dead be not defouled."

(Faery Queen, B. I. c. x. 43.)
2 Was not this picture painted by Paid Veronese, for example ?
" Arachne figured how Jove did abuse
Europa like a bull, and on his back
Her through the sea did bear : . . .
She seemed still back unto the land to look,
And her playfellows' aid to call, and fear
The dashing of the waves, that up she took

SPENSER 327

the gallery there is housed in the shell of an aban-
doned convent, so his in that of a deserted allegory.
And again, as at Venice yon swim in a gondola
from Gian Bellini to Titian, and from Titian to
Tintoret. so in him, where other cheer is wanting,
the gentle sway of his measure, like the rhytlunieal
impulse of the oar, floats you lullingly along from
picture to picture.

" If all the pens that ever poet held
Had fed the feeling of their master's thoughts,
And every sweetness that inspired their hearts
Their minds and muses on admired themes,
If all the heavenly quintessence they still
From their immortal flowers of poesy.
If these had made one poem's period,
And all combined in beauty's worthiness ;
Yet should there hover in their restless heads
One thought, one grace, one wonder at the best,
Wliieh into words no virtue can digest." ^

Spenser at his best, has come as near to expressing
tliis unattainable something as any other poet. He
is so purely poet that with him the meaning does
not so often modulate the music of the verse as the
music makes great part of the meaning and leads

Her dainty feet, and garments gathered near. . . .
Before the bull she pietvired winged Love,
With his young brother Sport, . . .
And many nymphs about them flocking roand,
And many Tritons which their horns did sound."

(Muiopotmos, 281-296.)
Spenser begins a complimentary sonnet prefixed to the Common'
wealth and Government of Venice (1599) with this beautiful verse,
" Fair Venice, flower of the last world's delight.' '

Perhaps we should read " lost " ?

^ Marlowe's Tamburlaine, Part I. Act V. 2.

328 SPENSER

the thought along its pleasant paths. No poet is

so splendidly superfluous as he ; none knows so

well that in poetry enough is not only not so good

as a feast, but is a beggarly parsimony. He spends

himself in a careless abundance only to be justified

by incomes of immortal youth.

" Pensier canuto n6 molto nfe poco
Si pu6 quivi albergare in alcun cuore ;
Non entra quivi disagio n^ inopia,
Ma vi sta ogii'or col coriio pien la Copia." ^

This delicious abundance and overrunning lux-
ury of Spenser appear in the very structure of his
verse. He found the ottava rinia too monoto-
nously iterative ; so, by changing the order of his
rhymes, he shifted the couplet from the end of the
stave, where it always seems to put on the brakes
with a jar, to the middle, where it may serve at
■will as a brace or a bridge ; he found it not roomy
enough, so first ran it over into another line, and
then ran that added line over into an alexandrine, in
which the melody of one stanza seems forever long-
ing and feeling forward after that which is to fol-
low. There is no ebb and flow in his metre more
than on the shores of tlie Adriatic, but wave fol-
lows wave with equable gainings and recessions,
the one sliding back in fluent music to be mingled
with and carried forward by the next. In all this
there is soothingness indeed, but no slumberous
monotony ; for Spenser was no mere metrist, but a

^ " Grayheaded Tlionght, nor tnucli nor little, may
Take up its lodging here in any heart ;
Unease nor Lack can enter at this door ;
But here dwells full-horned Plenty evermore."

(OrLFur., c yi. 73.)

SPENSER 329

great composer. By the variety of his pauses —
now at the close of the first or second foot, now of
the third, and again of the fourth — he gives spirit
and energy to a measure whose tendency it certainly
is to become languorous. He loiew how to make it
rapid and passionate at need, as in such verses as,

" But he, my lion, and my noble lord.
How does he find in cruel heart to hate
Her that him loved and ever most adored
As the God of my life ? Why hath he me abhorred ? " ^

or this,

" Come hither, come hither, 0, come hastily ! " ^

Joseph Warton objects to Spenser's stanza, that its
"constraint led him into many absurdities." Of
these he instances three, of which I shall notice
only one, since the two others (which suppose him
at a loss for words and rhymes) wiU hardly seem
valid to any one who knows the poet. It is that it
" obliged him to dilate the thing to be expressed,
however unimportant, with trifling and tedious cir-
cumlocutions, namely. Faery Queen, IL ii. 44 : —

* Now hath fair Phoebe with her silver face

Tlirice seen the shadows of this nether world,
Sith last I left that honorable place.
In which her royal presence is enrolled.'

That is, it is three months since I left her palace." ^

^ Faery Queen, I. c. iii. 7. Leigh Hunt, one of the most sympa-
thetic of critics, has remarked the passionate change from the
third to the first person in the last two verses.

- Faery Queen, H. c. viii. 8.

^ Observations on Faery Queen, vol. i. pp. 158, 159. Mr. Hughes
also objects to Spenser's mea-sure, that it is " closed always by a
full-stop, la the same place, by which every stanza is made as it

330 SPENSER

But Dr. Walton should have remembered (what
he too often forgets in his own verses) that, in spite
of Dr. Johnson's dictum, poetry is not prose, and
that verse only loses its advantage over the latter
by invading its province.^ Verse itself is an ab-
surdity except as an expression of some higher
movement of the mind, or as an expedient to lift
other minds to the same ideal level. It is the co-
thurnus wliich gives language an heroic s-tature. I
have said that one leading characteristic of Spen-
ser's style was its spaciousness, that he habitually
dilates rather than compresses. But his way of
measuring time was perfectly natural in an age
when everybody did not carry a dial in his poke as
now. He is the last of the poets, who went (with-
out affectation) by the great clock of the firma-
ment. Dante, the miser of words, who goes by the
same timepiece, is full of these roundabout ways of
telling us the hour. It had nothing to do with
Spenser's stanza, and I for one should be sorry to

•were a distinct paragraph." (Todd's Spenser, II. xli.) But he
coixld hardly have read the poem attentively, for there are numer-
ous instances to the contrary. Speuser was a consummate master
of versification, and not only did Marlowe and Shakespeare learn
of him, but I have little doubt that, but for the Faery Queen, we
should never have had the varied majesty of Milton's blank
Terse.

^ As where Dr. Warton himself says : —
" How nearly had my spirit past,

Till stopt by Metcalf 's skilful hand,
To death's dark regions wide and waste

And the black river's mournful strand,
Or to," etc.,
to the end of the next stanza. That is, I had died but for Dr.
Metcalf 's boluses.

SPENSER 331

lose these stately revolutions of the siiperne ruote.
Time itself becomes more noble when so measured ;
we never knew before of how precious a commodity
we had the wasting. Who would prefer the plain
time of day to this ?

" Now when Aldebaran wxs mounted high
Above the starry Cassiopeia's chair ' ' ;

or this ?

" By this the northern wagoner had set

His seven-fold team behind the steadfast star

That was in ocean's waves yet never wet,
But firm is fixt and sendeth light from far

To all that in the wide deep wandering are " ;

or this ?

" At last the golden oriental gate

Of greatest heaven gan to open fair,
And Phoebus, fresh as bridegroom to his mate.

Came dancing forth, shaking his dewy hair
And hurls his glistening beams through dewy air."

The generous indefiniteness, which treats an hour
more or less as of no account, is in keeping with
that sense of endless leisures which it is one chief
merit of the poem to suggest. But Spenser's dila-
tation extends to thoughts as well as to phrases
and images. He does not love the concise. Yet
his dilatation is not mere distension, but the expan-
sion of natural growth in the rich soil of his own
mind, wherein the merest stick of a verse puts forth
leaves and blossoms. Here is one of his, suggested
by Homer : ^ —

^ Iliad, XVII. .55 seqq. Referred to in Upton's note on Faery
Queen, B. I. c. vii. 32. Into what a breezy couplet trailing off
with an alexandrine has Homer's vvotul vavToiwv kvifioiv ex-

832 SPENSER

" Upon the top of all his lofty crest
A bunch of hairs discolored diversly,
With sprinkled pearl and gold full richly drest.
Did shake, and seemed to dance for jollity ;
Like to an almond-tree ymoiinted high
On top of green Selinus all alone
With blossoms brave bedecked daintily,
Whose tender locks do tremble every one

At every little breath that under heaven is blown."

And tliis is the way he reproduces five pregnant
verses of Dante : —

" Seggendo in piume
In fama non si vien, nh sotto coltre,
Senza la qxial chi sua vita consnma,
Cotal vestigio in terra di se lascia
Qoal fnmo in acre ed in acqua la schiuma."^

" Whoso in pomp of proud estate, quoth she,
Does swim, and bathes himself in courtly bliss,
Does waste his days in dark obscurity
And in oblivion ever buried is ;
Where ease abounds it 's eath to do amiss:
But who his limbs with labors and his mind
Behaves with cares, cannot so easy miss.

panded ! Chapman unfortunately has slurred this passage in his
version, and Pope tittivated it more than usual in his. I have no
other translation at hand. Marlowe was so fciken by this passage
in Spenser that he put it bodily into his Tamhurlaine.
1 Inferno, XXIV. 46-52.

' ' For sitting upon down,
Or under quilt, one cometh not to fame,
Withouten which whoso his life consumes
Such vestige leaveth of himself on earth
As smoke in air or in the water foam."

(Longfellow.)
It shows how little Dante was read during the last century that
none of the commentators on Spenser notice his most important
obligations to the great Tuscan.

SPENSER 333

Abroad in arms, at home in studious kind.
Who seeks with painful toil shall Ilouor soonest find.

" In woods, in waves, in ware, she wonts to dwell,

And will be found with peril and with pain,

Ne can tlie man tliat moulds in idle cell

Unto her happy ouxnsion attain ;

Before her gate high God did Sweat ordain,

And wakeful watches ever to abide ;

But easy is the way and passage plain

To pleasure's palace ; it may soon be spied,
And day and night her doors to all stand open wide." ^

Spenser's mind always demands this large elbow-
room. His thoughts are never pithily expressed,
but with a stately and sonorous proclamation, as if
under the open sky, that seems to me very noble.
For example, —

" The noble heart that harbors virtuous thought
And is with child of glorious-great intent
Can never rest until it forth have brought
The eternal brood of glory excellent." "

One's very soul seems to dilate with that last verse.
And here is a passage which Milton had read and
remembered : —

" And is there care in Heaven ? and is there love
In heavenly spirits to these creatures base,
That may compassion of their evils move ?
There is : else much more wretched were the case
Of men than beasts : but O, the exceeding grace
Of highest God, that loves his creatures so,
And all his works with mercy doth embrace,
That blessed angels he sends to and fro.

To serve to wicked man, to serve his wicked foe !

" How oft do they their silver bowers leave,
To come to succor us that succor want!

^ Faery Queen, B. II c. iii. 40, 41.
- Ibid., I. e. V. 1

334 SPENSER

How oft flo they with polclen pinions cleave
The fleeting skies like flying pursuivant,
Against foul fiends to aid us militant !
They for us fight, they watch and duly ward,
And their bright squadrons round about us plant ;
And all for love and nothing for reward ;
O, why should heavenly God to men have such regard ? " *

Ilis natural tendency is to shun whatever is sharp
and abrupt. lie loves to prolong emotion, and lin-
gers in his honeyed sensations like a bee in the
translucent cup of a lily. So entirely are beauty
and delight in it the native element of Spenser,
that, whenever in the " Faery Queen " you come
suddenly on the moral, it gives you a shock of un-
pleasant surprise, a kind of grit, as when one's
teeth close on a bit of gravel in a dish of straw-
berries and cream. He is the most fluent of our
poets. Sensation passing through emotion into
revery is a prime quality of his manner. And to
read him puts one in the condition of revery, a
state of mind in which our thoughts and feelings
float motionless, as one sees fish do in a gentle
stream, with just enough vibration of their fins to
keep themselves from going doAvn with the current,
while their bodies yield indolently to all its sooth-
ing curves. He chooses his language for its rich
canorousness rather than for intensity of meaning.
To characterize his style in a single word, I should
call it costly. None but the daintiest and nicest
phrases will serve him, and he allures us from one
to the other with such cunning baits of alliteration,
and such sweet lapses of verse, that never any word

' Faery Queen, II. c. viii. 1, 2.

SPENSER 335

seems more emineut than the rest, nor detains the
feeling to eddy around it, but you must go on to
the end before you have time to stop and muse
over the wealth that has been lavished on you.
But he has characterized and exemplified his own
style better than any description could do : —

" For round about the walls yclothed were

With g'oodly arras of great majesty,

Woven with gold and silk so close and near

That the rich metal lurked privily

As faiuing to be hid from envious eye ;

Yet here and there and everywhere, unwares

It showed itself and shone imwillingly

Like to a discolored snake whose hidden snares
Through the green g^ass his long bright-burnished back
declares." ^

And of the lulling quality of his verse take this as
a sample : —

" And, more to lull hira in his slumber soft,
A trickling stream from liigh rock tumbling down
And ever drizzling rain upon the loft,
Mixt with the murmuring wind much like the soun
Of swarming bees did cast him in a swoon.
No other noise, nor peoples' troublous cries.
As still are wont to annoy the walled town.
Might there be heard : but careless quiet lies

Wrapt in eternal silence far from enemies." ^

In the world into which Spenser carries us there
is neither time nor space, or rather it is outside of
and independent of them both, and so is purely
ideal, or, more truly, imaginary ; yet it is full of
form, color, and all earthly luxury, and so far, if
not real, yet apprehensible by the senses. There
are no men and women in it, yet it throngs with
1 Faery Queen, III, c. xi. 28. 2 Jbi^j.^ j, (., i 41.

336 SPENSER

airy and immortal shapes that have the likeness of
men and women, and hint at some kind of fore-
gone reality. Now this place, somewhere between
mind and matter, between soul and sense, between
the actual and the possible, is precisely the region
which Spenser assigns (if I have rightly divined
him) to the poetic susceptibility of impression, —

" To reign in the air from the earth to highest sky."

Underneath every one of the senses lies the soul
and spirit of it, dormant till they are magnetized
by some powerful emotion. Then whatever is im-
perishable in us recognizes for an instant and
claims kindred with something outside and distinct
from it, yet in some inconceivable way a part of it,
that flashes back on it an ideal beauty which im-
poverishes all other companionship. This exalta-
tion with which love sometimes subtilizes the nerves
of coarsest men so that they feel and see, not the
thing as it seems to others, but the beauty of it,
the joy of it, the soul of eternal youth that is in
it, woidd appear to have been the normal condition
of Spenser. While the senses of most men live in
the cellar, his " were laid in a large upper chamber
which opened toward the sunrisiug."

" His hirth was of the womh of morning dew,
And his conception of the joyous prime."

The very greatest poets (and is there, after all,
more than one of them?) have a way, I admit, of
getting within our inmost consciousness and in
a manner betraying us to ourselves. There is in
Spenser a remoteness very different from this, but

SPENSER 337

it is also a seclusion, and quite as agreeable, per-
haps quite as wholesome in certain moods when we
are glad to get away from ourselves and those im-
portimate trifles which we gravely call the realities
of life. In the warm Mediterranean of his mind
everything

" Suffers a sea-change
Into something rich and strange."

He lifts everything, not beyond recognition, but to
an ideal distance where no mortal, I had almost
said human, fleck is visible. Instead of the ordi-
nary bridal gifts, he hallows his wife with an Epi-
thalamion fit for a conscious goddess, and the
" savage soil " ^ of Ireland becomes a turf of Ar-
cady imder her feet, where the merchants' daugh-
ters of the town are no more at home than the
angels and the fair shapes of pagan mythology
whom they meet there. He seems to have had a
common-sense side to him, and could look at things
(if we may judge by his tract on Irish affairs) in
a practical and even hard way; but the moment
he turned toward poetry he fulfilled the condition
which his teacher Plato imposes on poets, and had
not a particle of prosaic understanding left. His
fancy, habitually moving about in worlds not real-
ized, unrealizes everything at a touch. The critics
blame him because in his Prothalamion the sub-

^ This phrase occurs in the sonnet addressed to the Earl of Or-
mond and in that to Lord Grey de Wilton in the series prefixed to
the Faery Queen. These sonnets are of a much stronger build
than the Amoretti, and some of them (especially that to Sir John
Norris) recall the firm tread of Milton's, though differing in struo-
ture.

338 SPENSER

jects of it enter on the Thames as swans and leave
it at Temple Gardens as noble damsels ; but to
those who are grown familiar with his imaginary
world sucli a transformation seems as natural as in
the old legend of the Knight of the Swan.

" Come now ye damsels, daughters of Delight,
Help quickly her to dight :
But first come ye, fair Hours, •which were begot
In Jove's sweet paradise of Day and Night, . . .
And ye three handmaids of the Cyprian Queen,
The which do still adorn her beauty's pride,
Help to adorn my beautif idest bride.

Crown ye god Bacchus ^^^th a coronal,

And Hymen also crown with wreaths of vine,

And let the Graces dance unto tlie rest, —

For they can do it best.
The whiles the maidens do their carols sing,
To which the woods shall answer and their echo ring."

The whole Epithalamion is very noble, with an
organ-like roll and majesty of numbers, while it is
instinct with the same joyousness which must have
been the familiar mood of Spenser. It is no su-
perficial and tiresome merriment, but a profound
delight in the beauty of the universe and in that
delicately surfaced nature of his which was its mir-
ror and counterpart. Sadness was alien to him,
and at funerals he was, to be sure, a decorous
mourner, as could not fail with so sympathetic a
temperament ; but his condolences are graduated
to the unimpassioned scale of social requirement.
Even for Sir Philip Sidney his sighs are regulated
by the official standard. It was in an unreal world
that his affections found their true object and vent,
and it is in an elegy of a lady whom he had never

SPENSER 339

known that he puts into the mouth of a husband
whom he has evaporated into a shepherd the two
most naturally pathetic verses he ever penned : —

" I hate the day because it lendeth light
To see all things, but not my love to see." ^

In the Epithalamion there is an epithet which has
been much admired for its felicitous tenderness : —

" Behold, whiles she before the altar stands,
Hearing the holy priest that to her speakes
And blesseth her with his two happy hands. "

But the purely impersonal passion of the artist
had already guided him to this lucky phrase. It
is addi-essed by Holiness — a dame surely as far
abstracted from the enthusiasms of love as we can
readily conceive of — to Una, who, like the vision-
ary Helen of Dr. Faustus, has every charm of
womanhood except that of being alive, as Juliet
and Beatrice are.

" 0 happy earth,
Whereon thy innocent feet do ever tread ! " -

Can we conceive of Una, the fall of whose foot
would be as soft as that of a rose-leaf upon its
mates already fallen, — can we conceive of her
treading anything so sordid ? No ; it is only on
some unsubstantial floor of dream that she walks
securely, herself a dream. And it is only when
Spenser has escaped thither, only when this gla-
mour of fancy has rarefied his wife till she is grown
almost as purely a creattu-e of the imagination as
the other ideal images with which he converses,

1 Baphnaida, 407, 408.
^ Faery Queen, I. c. x. 9.

340 SPENSER

that his feeling becomes as nearly passionate — as
nearly human, I was on the point of saying — as
with him is possible. 1 am so far from blaming
this idealizing property of his mind, that I find it
admirable in him. It is his quality, not his defect.
Without some touch of it life would be unendur-
able prose. If I have called the world to which he
transports us a world of unreality, I have wronged
him. It is only a world of unrealism. It is from
pots and pans and stocks and futile gossip and
inch-long politics that he emancipates us, and makes
us free of that to-morrow, always coming and never
come, where ideas shall reign supreme.^ But I am
keeping my readers from the sweetest idealization
that love ever wrought : —

" Unto this place whenas tlie elfin knight
Approached, him seemed that the merry sound
Of a shrill pipe, he playing heard on height.
And many feet fast thumping the hollow ground,
That through the woods their echo did rebound ;
He nigher drew to wit what it mote be.
There he a troop of ladies dancing foimd
Full merrily and making gladf ul glee ;
And in the midst a shepherd piping he did see.

" He durst not enter into the open green
For dread of them nnwares to be descried.
For breaking of their dance, if he were seen ;
But in the covert of the wood did bide
Beholding all, yet of them unespied ;
There he did see that pleased so much his sight

^ Strictly taken, perhaps his world is not much more imaginary
than that of other epic poets, Homer (in the Iliad) included. He
■who Ls familiar with mediseval epics will be extremely cautious in
drawing inferences as to contemporary manners from Homer. He
evidently archaizes like the rest.

SPENSER 341

That even he himself his eyes envied,

A hundred naked maidens lily-white,

All ranged in a ring and dancing in delight.

"All they without were ranged in a ring,
And danced round ; but in the midst of them
Three other ladies did both dance and sing,
The while the rest them round about did hem.
And like a garland did in compass stem.
And in the midst of these same three was placed
Another damsel, as a precious gem
Amidst a ring most richly well enchased,
That with her goodly presence all the rest much g^ced.

' Look how the crown which Ariadne wove
Upon her ivory forehead that same day,
That Theseus her unto his bridal bore,
(When the bold Centaurs made that bloody fray,
With the fierce Lapithes, that did them dismay)
Being now placed in the firmament,
Thi'ough the bright heaven doth her beams display,
And is unto the stars an ornament,
Which round about her move in order excellent ;

" Such was the beauty of this goodly band,
Whose sundry parts were here too long to tell.
But she that in the midst of them did stand,
Seemed all the rest in beauty to excel.
Crowned with a rosy gariand that right well
Did her beseem. And, ever as the crew
About her danced, sweet flowers that far did smell,
And fragrant odors they upon her threw ;

But most of all those three did her with gifts endue.

" Those were the graces, Daughters of Delight,
Handmaids of Venus, which are wont to haunt
Upon this hill and dance there, day and night ;
Those three to men all gifts of grace do grant
And all that Venus in herself doth vaunt
Is borrowed of them ; but that fair one
That in the midst was placed paravant.

342 SPENSER

Was she to whom that shepherd piped alone,
That made him pipe so merrilj', as never none.

"She was, to weet, that jolly shepherd's lass
Which piped there unto that merry rout ;
Tliat jolly shepherd that there piped was
Poor Colin Clout ; (who knows not Colin Clout ?)
He piped apace while they him danced about ;
Pipe, jolly shepherd, pipe thou now apace,
Unto thy love that made thee low to lout ;
Thy love is present there with thee in place,
Thy love is there advanced to be another Grace." ^

Is there any passage in any poet that so ripples
and sparkles with simple delight as this ? It is a
sky of Italian April fuU of sunshine and the hid-
den ecstasy of larks. And we like it all the more
that it reminds us of that passage in his friend
Sidney's Arcadia, where the shepherd-boy pipes
"as if he would never be old." If we compare it
with the mystical scene in Dante,^ of which it is a
reminiscence, it will seem almost like a bit of real
life ; but taken by itself it floats as unconcerned
in our cares and sorrows and vulgarities as a sunset
cloud. The sound of that pastoral pipe seems to
come from as far away as Thessaly when AjioUo
was keeping sheep there. Sorrow, the great ideal-
izer, had had the portrait of Beatrice on her easel
for years, and every touch of her pencil transfig-
ured the woman more and more into the glorified
saint. But Elizabeth Nagle was a solid thing of
flesh and blood, who would sit down at meat with
the poet on the very day when he had thus beati-

1 Faery Queen, VI. c. x. 10-16.

2 Purgatorio, XXIX., XXX.

SPENSER 343

fied her As Dante was drawn upward from heaven
to heaven by the eyes of Beatrice, so was Spenser
lifted away from the actual by those of that ideal
Beauty whereof his mind had conceived the linea-
ments in its solitary musings over Plato, but of
whose haunting presence the delicacy of his senses
had already premonished him. The intrusion of
the real world upon this supersensual mood of his
wrought an instant disenchantment : —

' ' Much wondered Calidore at this strange sight
Wliose like before his eye had never seen,
And, standing long astonished in sprite
And rapt with pleasance, wist not what to ween.
Whether it were the train of Beauty's Queen,
Or Nymphs, or Fairies, or enchanted show
With which his eyes might have deluded been.
Therefore resolving what it was to know.
Out of the woods he rose and toward them did go.

" But soon as he appeared to their view
They vanished all away out of his sight
And clean were gone, which way he never knew,
All save the shepherd, who, for fell despite
Of that displeasure, broke his bagpipe quite."

Ben Jonson said that " he had consumed a
whole night looking to his great toe, about which
he had seen Tartars and Turks, Romans and Car-
thaginians, fight in his imagination " ; and Cole-
ridge has told us how his "eyes made pictures
when they were shut." This is not uncommon, but
I fancy that Spenser was more habitually possessed
by his imagination than is usual even with poets.
His visions must have accompanied him "in glory
and in joy " along the common thoroughfares of
life and seemed to him, it may be suspected, more

344 SPENSER

real than the men and women he met there. His
" most fine spirit of sense " would have tended to
keep him in this exalted mood. I must give an
example of the sensuousness of which I have
spoken : —

" And in the midst of all a fountain stood
Of richest substance that on earth might be,
So pure and shiny that the crystal flood
Through every channel ruiming one might see ;
Most goodly it with curious imagery
Was overwrought, and shapes of naked boys,
Of which some seemed with lively jollity
To fly about, playing their wanton toys,
Whilst others did themselves embay in liquid joys.

" And over all, of purest gold was spread

A trail of ivy in his native hue ;

For the rich metal was so colored

That he who did not well avised it view

Would surely deem it to be ivy true ;

Low his lascivious arms adown did creep

That themselves dipping in the silver dew

Their fleecj' flowers they tenderly did steep.
Which drops of crystal seemed for wantonness to weep.

* ' Infinite streams continually did well
Out of this fountain, sweet and fair to see.
The which into an ample laver fell,
And shortly grew to so great quantity
That like a little lake it seemed to be
Whose depth exceeded not three cubits' height.
That through the waves one might the bottom see
All paved beneath with jasper sliining bright,
That seemed the fountain in that sea did sail upright.

" And all the margent round about was set
With shady laurel-trees, thence to defend
The sunny beams which on the billows bet.
And those which therein bathed mote offend.

spi'jyuER 346

As Gnyon happened by the same to wend
Two naked Damsels he therein espied,
Which therein bathing seemed to contend
And wrestle wantonly, ne cared to hide
Their dainty parts from -saew of any which them eyed.

" Sometimes the one would lift the other quite
Above the waters, and then down again
Her plunge, as overmastered by might,
Where both awhile would covered remain,
And each the other from to rise restrain ;
The whiles their snowy limbs, as through a veil,
So through the crystal waves appeared plain :
Tlien suddenly both would themselves unhele,
And the amorous sweet spoils to greedy eyes reveal.

' ' As that fair star, the messenger of morn,
His dewy face out of the sea doth rear ;
Or as the Cyprian goddess, newly born
Of the ocean's fruitful froth, did first appear ;
Such seemed they, and so their yellow hear
Crystalline humor dropped down apace.
Whom such when Guyon saw, he drew him near,
And somewhat gan relent his earnest pace ;
His stubborn breast gan secret pleasance to embrace.

" The wanton Maidens him espying, stood
Gazing awhile at his unwonted guise ;
Then the one herself low ducked in the flood,
Abashed that her a stranger did avise ;
But the other rather higher did arise,
And her two lily paps aloft displayed,
And all that might his melting heart entice
To her delights, she unto him bewrayed ;
The rest, hid underneath, him more desirous made.

" With that the other likewise up arose,
And her fair locks, which formerly were bound
Up in one knot, she low adown did loose,
Which flowing long and thick her clothed around,
And the ivory in golden mantle gowned :

346 SPENSER

So tliat fair spectacle from him was reft,
Yet that which reft it no less fair was found ;
iSo hid in locks and waves from lookers' theft,
Naught but her lovely face she for his looking left.

"Withal she laughed, and she blushed withal.
That blushing to her laughter gave more grace,
And laughter to her blushing, as did fall.

Eftsoones they heard a most melodious sound,
Of all that mote delight a dainty ear,
Such as at once might not on living ground.
Save in this paradise, be heard elsewhere :
Right hard it was for wight which did it hear
To read what manner music that mote be ;
For all that pleasing is to living ear
Was there consorted in one harmony ;
Birds, voices, instruments, winds, waters, all agree.

" The joyous birds, shrouded in cheerful shade.
Their notes unto the voice attempered sweet ;
The angelical soft trembling voices made
To the instruments divine respondence mete ;
The silver-sounding instruments did meet
With the base mui-mur of the water's fall ;
The water's fall with difference discreet.
Now soft, now loud, unto the wind did call ;

The gentle wai-bling wind low answered to all."

Spenser, in one of his letters to Harvey, had
said, " Why, a God's name, may not we, as else the
Greeks, have the kingdom of our own language ? "
This is in the tone of Bellay, as is also a great deal
of what is said in the epistle prefixed to the " Shep-
herd's Calendar." He would have been wiser had
he followed more closely Bellay's advice about the
introduction of novel words : " Fear not, then, to
innovate somewhat, particularly in a long poem,
with modesty, however, with analogy, and judg-

SPENSER 347

nient of ear ; aiul trouble not thyself as to who
may think it good or bad, hoping that posterity
will approve it, — she who gives faith to doubtful,
light to obscure, novelty to antique, usage to \mac-
customed, and sweetness to harsh and rude things."
Spenser's innovations were by no means always
happy, as not always according with the genius of
the language, and they have therefore not pre-
vailed. He forms English words out of French or
Italian ones, sometimes, I think, on a misapprehen-
sion of their ti'ue meaning ; nay, he sometimes
makes new ones by iinlawfully gi-afting a scion of
Romance on a Teutonic root. His theory, caught
from Bellay, of rescuing good archaisms from un-
warranted oblivion, was excellent ; not so his prac-
tice of being archaic for the mere sake of escaping
from the common and familiar. A permissible
archaism is a word or phrase that has been sup-
planted by something less apt, but has not become
unintelligible ; and Spenser's often needed a glos-
sary, even in his own day.^ But he never endangers
his finest passages by any experiments of this kind.
There his language is living, if ever any, and of
one substance with the splendor of his fancy. Like
all masters of speech, he is fond of toying with and
teasing it a little ; and it may readily be granted
that he sometimes " hunted the letter," as it was
called, out of all cry. But even where his alhtera-

^ I find a goodly number of Yankeeisms in him, such as idee
(not as a rhyme) ; but the oddest is his twice spelling dew deow,
which is just as one would spell it who wished to phonetize it3
sound in rural New England.

348 SPENSER

tion is temiited to an excess, its prolonged echoes
caress the ear like the fading and gathering rever-
bei'ations of an Alpine horn, and one can find in
his heart to forgive even such a debauch of initial
assonances as

" Eftsoones her shallow ship away did slide,
More swift than swallow shears the liquid sky."

Generally, he scatters them at adroit intervals, re-
minding us of the arrangement of voices in an an-
cient catch, where one voice takes up the phrase
another has dropped, and thus seems to give the
web of harmony a firmer and more continuous tex-
ture.

Other poets have held their mirrors up to nature,
mirrors that differ very widely in the truth and
beauty of the images they reflect ; but Spenser's is
a magic glass in which we see few shadows cast
back from actual life, but visionary shapes conjured
up by the wizard's art from some confusedly re-
membered past or some impossible future ; it is
like one of those still pools of mediaeval legend
which covers some sunken city of the antique
world ; a reservoir in which all our dreams seem to
have been gathered. As we float upon it, we see
that it pictures faithfully enough the summer-clouds
that drift over it, the trees that grow about its
margin, but in the midst of these shadowy echoes
of actuality we catch faint tones of bells that seem
blown to us from beyond the horizon of time, and
looking down into the clear depths, catch glimpses
of towers and far-shining knights and peerless
dames that waver and are gone. Is it a world that

SPENSER 3-19

ever was, or shall be, or can be, or but a delusion ?
Spenser's world, real to him, is real enough for us
to take a holiday in, and we may well be content
with it when the earth we dwell on is so often too
real to allow of such vacations. It is the same kind
of world that Petrarca's Laura has walked in for
five centuries with all ears listening for the music
of her footfall.

The land of Spenser is the land of Dream, but
it is also the laud of Rest. To read him is like
dreaming awake, without even the trouble of doing
it yourself, but letting it be done for you by the
finest dreamer that ever lived, who knows how to
color his dreams like life and make them move be-
fore you in music. They seem singing to you as
the sirens to Guyon, and we linger like him : —

" 0, thou fair son of gentle Faery
That art in mighty arms most magnified
Above all knights that ever battle tried,
O, turn thy rudder hitherward awhile,
Here may thy storm-beat vessel safely ride.
This is the port of rest from troublous toil.
The world's sweet inn from pain and wearisome turmoil.^

" With that the rolling sea, resounding swift
In his big bass, them fitly answered,

^ This song recalls that in Dante's Purgatorio (XIX. 19-24), in
which the Italian tongue puts forth all its siren allurements.
Browne's beautiful verses (" Turn, hither turn your winged
pines") were suggested by these of Spenser. It might almost
seem as if Spenser had here, in his usual way, expanded the sweet
old verses : —

" Merry sungen the monks binnen Ely
When Knut king rew thereby ;
' Roweth knightes near the lond,
That I may hear these monkes song.' "

360 SPENSER

And on the rock the waves, breaking aloft,
A solemn mean unto them measured,
The whiles sweet Zephyrus loud whisteled
His treble, a strange kind of harmony
Which Guyon's senses softly tickeled
That he the boatman bade row easily
And let him hear some part of tlieir rare melody."

Despite Spenser's instinctive tendency to idealize,
and his habit of distilling out of the actual an
ethereal essence in which very little of the possible
seems left, yet his mind, as is generally true of
great poets, was founded on a solid basis of good-
sense. I do not know where to look for a more co-
gent and at the same time picturesque confutation
of Socialism than in the Second Canto of the Fifth
Book. If I apprehend rightly his words and
images, there is not only subtle but profound think-
ing here. The French Revolution is prefigured in
the well-meaning but too theoretic giant, and Rous-
seau's fallacies exposed two centuries in advance.
Spenser was a conscious Englishman to his inmost
fibre, and did not lack the sound judgment in poli-
tics which belongs to his race. He was the more
English for hving in Ireland, and there is some-
thing that moves us deeply in the exile's passionate
cry: —

" Dear Country ! O how dearly dear
Ought thy remembrance and perpetual band
Be to thy foster-child that from thy hand
Did common breath and nouriture receive !
How brutish is it not to understand
How much to her we owe that all us gave,
That gave unto us all whatever good we have ! "

His race shows itself also where he tells us that

SPENSER 361

" chiefly skill to ride seems a science
Proper to gentle blood,"

which reminds one of Lord Herbert of Cherbury's
saying that the finest sight God looked down on
was a fine man on a fine horse.

Wordsworth, in the supplement to his preface,
tells us that the " Faery Queen " " faded before "
Sylvester's ti-anslation of Du Bartas. But Words-
worth held a brief for himself in this case, and is
no exception to the proverb about men who are
their own attorneys. His statement is wholly un-
founded. Both poems, no doubt, so far as popular-
ity is concerned, yielded to the graver interests of
the Civil War. But there is an appreciation much
weightier than any that is implied in mere popu-
larity, and the vitality of a poem is to be measured
by the kind as well as the amount of influence it
exerts. Spenser has coached more poets and more
eminent ones than any other writer of English
verse. I need say nothing of Milton, nor of pro-
fessed disciples like Browne, the two Fletchers,
and More. Cowley tells us that he became " irre-
coverably a poet " by reading the " Faery Queen "
when a boy. Dryden, whose case is particularly
in point because he confesses having been seduced
by Du Bartas, tells us that Spenser had been his
master in English. He regrets, indeed, comically
enough, that Spenser could not have read the rules
of Bossu, but adds that " no man was ever born
with a greater genius or more knowledge to support
it." Pope says, " There is something in Spenser
that pleases one as strongly in one's old age as it

352 SPENSER

did in one's youth. I read the Faery Queen wlien
I was about twelve with a vast deal of delight ; and
I think it gave me as much when I read it over
about a year or two ago." Thomson wrote the
most delightful of his poems in the measure of
Spenser ; Collins, Gray, and Akenside show traces
of him ; and in our own day his influence reappears
in Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, and Keats. Lan-
dor is, I believe, the only poet who ever found him
tedious. Spenser's mere manner has not had so
many imitators as Milton's, but no other of our
poets has given an impulse, and in the right direc-
tion also, to so many and so diverse minds ; above
all, no other has given to so many young souls a
consciousness of their wings and a delight in the
use of them. He is a standing protest against the
tyranny of Commonplace, and sows the seeds of a
noble discontent with prosaic views of life and the
didl uses to which it may be put.

Three of Spenser's own verses best characterize
the feeling his poetry gives us : —

"Among wide waves set like a little nest,"
"Wrapt in eternal silence far from enemies,"
" The world's sweet inn from pain and wearisome turmoU."

We are wont to apologize for the grossness of our
favorite authors sometimes by saying that their age
was to blame and not they ; and the excuse is a
good one, for often it is the frank word that shocks
us while we tolerate the thing. Spenser needs no
such extenuations. No man can read the " Faery

SPENSER 353

Queen " and be anything but the better for it.
Thi'ougli that rude age, when Maids of Honor
drank beer for breakfast and Hamlet could say a
gross thing to Ophelia, he passes serenely ab-
stracted and high, the Don Quixote of poets.
Whoever can endure unmixed delight, whoever
can tolerate music and painting and poetry all in
one, whoever washes to be rid of thought and to
let the busy anvils of the brain be silent for a time,
let him read in the " Faery Queen." There is the
land of pure heart's ease, where no ache or sorrow
of spirit can enter.

WORDSWORTH

1875

A GENERATION has now passed away since
Wordsworth was laid with the family in the church-
yard at Grasmere.^ Perhaps it is hardly yet time
to take a perfectly impartial measure of his value
as a poet. To do this is especially hard for those
who are old enough to remember the last shot
which the foe was sullenly firing in that long war
of critics which began when he published his man-
ifesto as Pretender, and which came to a pause
rather than to an end when they flung up their
caps with the rest at his final coronation. Some-
thing of the intensity of the odium theologicum (if
indeed the cmtheticum be not in these days the
more bitter of the two) entered into the conflict.
The Wordsworthians were a sect, who, if they had
the enthusiasm, had also not a little of the exclu-
siveness and partiality to which sects are liable.
The verses of the master had for them the virtue of
religious canticles stimulant of zeal and not amen-

^ "I pay many little visits to the family in the churchyard at
Grasmere," writes James Dixon (an old servant of Wordsworth)
to Crabb Robinson, with a simple, one might almost say canine
pathos, thirteen years after his master's death. Wordsworth
was always considerate and kind with Jiis serv'ants, Robinson tells
us.

WORDSWORTH 355

able to the ordinary tests of cold-blooded criticism.
Like the hyums of the Huguenots and Covenant-
ers, they were songs of battle no less than of wor-
ship, and the combined ai-dors of conviction and
conflict lent them a fire that was not naturally their
ovm. As we read them now, that virtue of the
moment is gone out of them, and whatever of Dr.
AVattsiness there is gives us a slight shock of dis-
enchantment. It is something like the difference
between the JIarseillaise sung by armed propa-
gandists on the edge of battle, or by Brissotins in
the tumbrel, and the words of it read coolly in
the closet, or recited with the factitious frenzy of
Therese. It was natural in the early days of
Wordsworth's career to dwell most fondly on those
profounder qxialities to appreciate wliich settled in
some sort the measure of a man's right to judge of
poetry at all. But now we must admit the short-
comings, the failures, the defects, as no less essen-
tial elements in forming a sound judgment as to
whether the seer and artist were so united in him
as to justify the claim first put in by himself and
afterwards maintained by his sect to a place beside
the few great poets who exalt men's minds, and
give a right direction and safe outlet to their pas-
sions through the imagination, while insensibly
helping them toward balance of character and se-
renity of judgment by stimulating their sense of
proportion, form, and the nice adjustment of means
to ends. In none of our poets has the constant
propulsion of an unbending will, and the concen-
tration of exclusive, if I must not say somewhat

356 WORDSWORTH

narrow, sympathies done so niucli to make the ori-
ginal endowment of nature efft'ctive, and in none
accordingly does the biography throw so much light
on the works, or enter so lai-gely into their composi-
tion as an element whether of power or of weakness.
Wordsworth never saw, and I think never wished
to see, beyond the limits of his own consciousness
and experience. He early conceived himself to be,
and through life was confirmed by circumstances
in the faith that he was, a "dedicated spirit," ^ a
state of mind likely to further an intense but at
the same time one-sided development of the intel-
lectual powers. The solitude in which the greater
part of his mature life was passed, while it doubt-
less ministered to the passionate intensity of his
musings upon man and nature, was, it may be sus-
pected, harmful to him as an artist, by depriving
him of any standard of jiroportion outside himself
by which to test the comparative value of his
thoughts, and by rendering him more and more
incapable of that urbanity of mind which coidd be
gained only by commerce with men more nearly
on his own level, and which gives tone without
lessening individuality. Wordsworth never quite
saw the distinction between the eccentric and the
original. For what we call originality seems not

^ In the Prelude he attributes this consecration to a sunrise
seen (during' a college vacation) as he walked homeward from
some viUage festival where he had danced all night : —
" My heart was full ; I made no vows, but vows
AYere then made for me ; bond unknown to me
Was given that I should be. else sinning greatly,
A dedicated Spirit." (B. lY.)

WORDSWORTH 357

so much anything peculiar, much less anything
odd, but that quality in a man which touches hu-
man nature at most points of its circmnference,
which reinvigorates the consciousness of our own
powers by recalling and confirming our osvn un-
valued sensations and perceptions, gives classic
tihape to our on^ti amorphous imaginings, and ade-
quate utterance to our own stammering conceptions
or emotions. The poet's office is to be a Voice,
not of one crying in the \vilderness to a knot of
already magnetized acolytes, but singing amid the
throng of men, and lifting their common aspira-
tions and s}Tn])atliies (so first clearly revealed to
themselves) on the wings of his song to a purer
ether and a wider reach of view. We cannot, if
we woidd, read the poetry of Wordsworth as mere
poetry ; at every other page we find ourselves en-
tangled in a problem of aesthetics. The world-old
question of matter and form, of whether nectar is
of precisely the same flavor when served to us from
a Grecian chalice or from any jug of ruder pot-
tery, comes up for decision anew. The Teutonic
nature has always shown a sturdy preference of
the solid bone with a marrow of nutritious moral
to any shadow of the same on the flowing mirror
of sense. Wordsworth never lets us long forget
the deepty rooted stock from which he sprang, —
vien hen da lui.

William Wordsworth was born at Cockermouth
in Cumberland, on the 7th of April, 1770, the
second of five children. His father was John

358 WORDSWORTH

Wordswortli, an attorney-at-law, and agent of Sit
James Lowtlier, afterwards first Earl of Lonsdale.
His mother was Aune Cookson, the daughter of a
mercer in Penrith. His paternal ancestors had
been settled immemorially at Penistone in York-
shire, whence his grandfather had emigrated to
Westmoreland. His mother, a woman of piety and
wisdom, died in March, 1778, being then in her
thirty-second year. His father, who never entirely
cast off the depression occasioned by her death,
survived her but five years, dying in December,
1783, wlien William was not quite fourteen years
old.

The poet's early childhood was passed partly at
Cockermouth, and partly with his maternal grand-
father at Penrith. His first teacher appears to
have been Mrs. Anne Birkett, a kind of Shenstone's
Schoolmistress, who practised the memory of her
pupils, teaching them chiefly by rote, and not en-
deavoring to cultivate their reasoning faculties, a
process by which children are apt to be converted
from natural logicians into impertinent sophists.
Among his schoolmates here was Mary Hutchinson,
who afterwards became his wife.

In 1778 he was sent to a school founded by Ed-
win Sandys, Archbishop of York,! in the year 1585,
at Hawkshead in Lancashire. Hawkshead is a small
market-to\vn in the vale of Esthwaite, about a third
of a mile northwest of the lake. Here Wordsworth

1 Father of Geoi^e Sandys, Treasurer of the Virginia Com-
pany, translator, while in Virginia, of Ovid's Metamorphoses, and
author of a book of travels in the East dear to Dr. Johnson.

WORDSWORTH 359

passed nine years, aniono- a |)t'oi)le of simple habits
and scenery of a sweet and pastoral dignity. His
earliest intimacies were with the mountains, lakes,
and streams of his native district, and the associa-
tions with which his mind was stored during its most
impressible period were noble and pure. The boys
were boarded among the dames of the village, thus
enjoying a freedom from scholastic restraints, which
could be nothing but beneficial in a place where the
temi)tations were only to sports that hardened the
body while they fostered a love of nature in the
spii-it and habits of observation in the mind. Words-
worth's ordinary amusements here were hunting
and fishing, rowing, skating, and long walks around
the lake and among the hills, with an occasional
scamper on horseback.^ His life as a school-boy
was favorable also to his poetic development, in
being identified with that of the people among
whom he lived. Among men of simple habits, and
where there are small diversities of condition, the
feelings and passions are displayed with less re-
sti'aint, and the young poet grew acquainted with
that primal human basis of character where the
Muse finds firm foothold, and to which he ever
afterward cleared his way through all the overlying
drift of conventionalism. The dalesmen were a
primitive and hardy race who kept alive the tradi-
tions and often the habits of a more picturesque
time. A common level of interests and of social
standing fostered unconventional ways of thought
and speech, and friendly human sympathies. Soli-

1 Prelude, Book II.

860 WORDSWORTH

tude induced reflection, a reliance of the mind on
its own resources, and individuality of character.
Where everybody knew everybody, and everybody's
father had known everybody's father, the interest
of man in man was not likely to become a matter
of cold hearsay and distant report. When death
knocked at any door in the hamlet, there was an
echo from every fireside, and a wedding dropt its
white flowers at every threshold. There was not a
grave in the churchyard but had its story ; not a
crag or glen or aged tree untouched with some ideal
hue of legend. It was here that Wordsworth
learned that homely hiunanity which gives such
depth and sincerity to his poems. Travel, society,
culture, nothing could obliterate the deep trace of
that early training which enables him to speak di-
rectly to the primitive instincts of man. He was
apprenticed early to the difficult art of being him-
self.

At school he wrote some task- verses on subjects
imposed by the master, and also some voluntaries
of his own, equally undistinguished by any peculiar
merit. But he seems to have made up his mind as
early as in his fourteenth year to become a poet,^
"It is recorded," says his biographer vaguely,
" that the poet's father set him very early to learn
portions of the best English poets by heart, so that
at an early age he could repeat large portions of
Shakespeare, Milton, and Spenser." ^

1 '' I to the muses have been bound,

These fourteen years, by strong- indentures."

Idiot Boy (1T98).
^ I think this more than doubtful, for I End no traces of the

WORDSWORTH 361

The great event of AVordsworth's school-clays
was the death of his father, who left what may be
called a hypothetical estate, consisting chiefly of
claims upon the first Earl of Lonsdale, the pay-
ment of which, though their justice was acknow-
ledged, that nobleman contrived in some unex-
plained way to elude so long as he lived. In
October, 1787, he left school for St. John's Col-
lege, Cambridge. He was already, we are told, a
fair Latin scholar, and had made some progress in
mathematics. The earliest books we hear of his
reading were Don Quixote, Gil Bias, Gulliver's
Travels, and the Tale of a Tub ; but at school he
had also become familiar with the works of some
English poets, particularly Goldsmith and Gray, of
whose poems he had learned many by heart. What
is more to the purpose, he had become, without
knowing it, a lover of Nature in all her moods, and
the same mental necessities of a solitaiy life which
compel men to an interest in the transitory phe-
nomena of scenery had made him also studious of
the movements of his own mind, and the mutual
interaction and dependence of the external and in-
ternal universe.

Doubtless his early orphanage was not without
its effect in confirming a character naturally impa-
tient of control, and his mind, left to itself, clothed
itself with an indigenous growth, which grew fairly
and freely, unstinted by the shadow of exotic plan-
influence of any of these poets in his earlier writings. Goldsmith
■was evidently his model in the Descriptive Sketches and the Eveni»
ing Walk. I speak of them as originally printed.

362 WORDSWORTH

tations. It has become a truism, that remarkable
persons have remarkable mothers ; but perhaps
this is chiefly true of such as have made them-
selves distinguished by their industr}^ and by the
assiduous cultivation of faculties in themselves of
only an average quality. It is rather to be noted
how little is known of the parentage of men of the
first magnitude, how often they seem in some sort
foundlings, and how early an apparently adverse
destiny begins the culture of those who are to en-
counter and master great intellectual or spiritual
experiences.

Of his disposition as a child little is known, but
that little is characteristic. lie himself tells us
that he was " stiff, moody, and of violent temper."
His mother said of him that he was the only one
of her children about whom she felt any anxiety, —
for she was sure that he would be remarkable for
good or evil. Once, in resentment at some fancied
injury, he resolved to kill himself, but his heart
failed him. I suspect that few boys of passionate
temperament have escaped these momentary sug-
gestions of despairing helplessness. " On another
occasion," he says, " while I was at my grand-
father's house at Penrith, along with my eldest
brother Richard, we were wdiipping tops together
in the long drawing-room, on which the carpet was
only laid down on particular occasions. The walls
were hung round with family pictures, and I said
to my brother, ' Dare you strike your whip through
that old lady's petticoat?' He replied, 'No, I
won't.' ' Then,' said I, ' here goes,' and I struck

WORDSWORTH 363

my lash through her hooped petticoat, for which,
no doubt, though I have forgotten it, I was pi'op-
erly punished. But, possibly from some want of
judgment in punishments inflicted, I had become
perverse and obstinate in defying chastisement,
and rather proud of it than otherwise." This last
anecdote is as happily tyjjical as a bit of Greek
mythology which always prefigured the lives of
heroes in the stories of their childhood. Just so
do we find him afterward striking his defiant lash
through the hooped petticoat of the artificial style
of poetry, and proudly unsubdued by the punish-
ment of the Re%aewers.

Of his college life the chief record is to be found
in "The Prelude." He did not distinguish himself
as a scholar, and if his life had any incidents, they
were of that interior kind which rarely appear in
biography, though they may be of controlling influ-
ence upon the life. He speaks of reading Chaucer,
Spenser, and Milton while at Cambridge,^ but no
reflection from them is visible in his earliest pub-
lished poems. The gi-eater part of his vacations
was spent in his native Lake-countrj^ where his only
sister, Dorothy, was the companion of his rambles.
She was a woman of large natural endowments,

1 Prelude, Book III. He studied Italian also at Cambridge ;
his teacher, whose name was Isola, had formerly tauglit the poet
Gray. It may be pretty certainly inferred, however, that his first
systematic study of Engflish poetry was due to the copy of Ander-
son's British Poets, left with him by his sailor brother John on
setting out for his last voyage in 1805. It was the daughter of
this Isola, Emma, who was afterwards adopted by Charles and
Mary Lamb.

364 WORDSWORTH

chiefly of the receptive kind, and had much to do
with the formation and tendency of the poet's
mind. It was she who called forth the shyer sen-
sibilities of his nature, and taught an originally
harsh and austere imagination to surround itself
with fancy and feeling, as the rock fringes itself
with a sun-spray of ferns. She was his first Pub-
lic, and belonged to that class of prophetically
appreciative temperaments whose apparent office
it is to cheer the early solitude of original minds
with messages from the future. Through the
greater part of his life she continued to be a kind
of poetical conscience to him.

Wordsworth's last college vacation was spent
in a foot journey upon the Continent (1790). In
January, 1791, he took his degree of B. A., and
left Cambridge. During the summer of this year
he visited Wales, and, after declining to enter
upon holy orders under the plea that he was not of
age for ordination, went over to France in Novem-
ber, and remained during the winter at Orleans.
Here he became intimate with the republican Gen-
eral Beaupuis, with whose hopes and aspirations he
ardently sympathized. In the spring of 1792 he
was at Blois, and returned thence to Orleans, which
he finally quitted in October for Paris. He re-
mained here as long as he could with safety, and at
the close of the year went back to England, thus,
perhaps, escaping the fate which soon after over-
took his friends the Brissotins.

As hitherto the life of Wordsworth may be
called a fortunate one, not less so in the training

WORDSWOllTII 365

and expansion of his faculties was this period of
liis stay in France. Born and reared in a country
where the homely and familiar nestles confidingly
amid the most savage and sublime forms of na-
ture, he had experienced whatever impulses the
creative faculty can receive from mountain and
cloud and the voices of winds and waters, but he
had known man only as an actor in fireside his-
tories and tragedies, for which the hamlet supplied
an am]>le stage. In France he first felt the au-
thentic beat of a nation's heart ; he was a spectator
at one of those dramas where the terrible footfall
of the Eumenides is heard nearer and nearer in
the pauses of the action ; and he saw man such as
he can only be when he is vibrated by the orgasm
of a national emotion. He sympathized ^vith the
hopes of France and of mankind deeply, as was
fitting in a young man and a poet ; and if his faith
in the orreo:arious advancement of men was after-
ward shaken, he only held the more firmly by his
belief in the individual, and his reverence for the
human as something quite apart from the popular
and above it. AVordsworth has been unwisely
blamed, as if he had been recreant to the liberal
instincts of his youth. But it was inevitable that
a genius so regulated and metrical as his, a mind
which always compensated itself for its artistic
radicalism by an involuntary leaning toward exter-
nal respectability, should recoil from whatever was
convulsionary and destructive in politics, and above
all in religion. He reads the poems of Words-
worth without understanding, who does not find in

366 WORDS WOR TH

them the noblest incentives to faith in man and
the gi-andeur of his destiny, founded always upon
that personal dignity and virtue, the capacity for
whose attainment alone makes universal liberty
possible and assures its permanence. He was to
make men better by opening to them the sources
of an inalterable well-being; to make them free,
in a sense higher than political, by showing them
that these sources are within them, and that no
contrivance of man can permanently emancipate
narrow natures and depraved minds. His politics
were always those of a poet, circling in the larger
orbit of causes and principles, careless of the tran-
sitory oscillation of events.

The change in his point of view (if change there
was) certainly was complete soon after his return
from France, and was perhaps due in part to the
influence of Burke,

" While he [Burke] forewarns, denounces, launches forth.
Against all systems built on abstract rights,
Keen ridicule ; the majesty proclaims
Of institutes and laws hallowed by time ;
Declares the vital power of social ties
Endeared by custom ; and with high disdain.
Exploding upstart theory, insists
Upon the allegiance to which men are bom.
. . . Could a youth, and one

In ancient story versed, Avhose breast hath heaved
Under the weight of classic eloquence,
Sit, see, and hear, unthankful, uninspired ? " ^

^ Prelude, Book VII. Written before 1805, and referring to a
BtUl earlier date. " Wordsworth went in powder, and with cocked
hat under his arm, to the Marchioness of Stafford's rout."'
(Southey to Miss Barker, May, 1806.)

won DS WORTH 367

lie had seen the Fieuch for a dozen years
eagerly busy in tearing u}) whatever had roots in
the past, replacing the venerable trunks of tra-
dition and orderly gi-owth with liberty-poles, then
striving vainly to piece together the fibres they had
broken, and to reproduce artificially that sense of
permanence and continuity which is the main safe-
guard of vigorous self-consciousness in a nation.
He became a Tory thi-ough intellectual conviction,
retaining, I suspect, to the last, a certain radicalism
of temperament and instinct. As in Carlyle, so in
him something of the peasant survived to the last.
Haydon tells us that in 1809 Sir George Beaumont
said to him and Wilkie, " Wordsworth may per-
haps walk in ; if he do, I caution you both against
his terrific democratic notions " ; and it must have
been many years later that Wordsworth himself
told Crabb Robinson, " I have no respect whatever
for Whigs, but I have a great deal of the Chartist
in me." In 1802, during his tour in Scotland, he
travelled on Sundays as on the other days of the
week.^ He afterwards became a theoretical church-
goer. " Wordsworth defended earnestly the Church
establishment. He even said he would shed his
blood for it. Nor was he disconcerted by a laugh
raised against him on account of his having con-
fessed that he knew not when he had been in a
church in his own country. ' All our ministers are
so vile,' said he. The mischief of allowing the

^ This was probably one reason for the long suppression of Miss
Wordsworth's journal, which she had evidently prepared for pub-
lication as early as 1805.

368 WORDSWORTH

clergy to depend on the caprice of the midtitude
he thought more than outweiglied all the evils of
an establishment." ^

In December, 1792, Wordsworth had returned
to England, and in the following year published
" Descriptive Sketches " and the " Evening AValk."
He did this, as he says in one of his letters, to show
that, although he had gained no honors at the Uni-
versity, he could do something. They met with no
great success, and he afterward corrected them so
much as to destroy all their interest as juvenile i)ro-
ductions, without communicating to them any of
the merits of maturity. In commenting, sixty years
afterward, on a couplet in one of these poems, —

" Aud, fronting the bright west, the oak entwines
Its darkening boughs and leaves in stronger lines," —

he says : " This is feebly and imperfectly expressed,
but I recollect distinctly the very spot where this
first struck me. . . . The moment was important
in my poetical history ; for I date from it my con-
sciousness of the infinite variety of natural appear-
ances which had been unnoticed by the poets of
any age or country, so far as I was acquainted with
them, and I made a resolution to supply in some
degree the deficiency."

It is plain that Wordsworth's memory was play-
ing him a trick here, misled by that instinct (it
may almost be called) of consistency which leads
men first to desire that their lives shoidd have been
without break or seam, and then to believe that
they have been such. The more distant ranges of
^ Crabb Robinson, i. 250, Am. ed.

WORDSWORTH 369

perspective are apt to run toixother in retrospection.
How far could Wordsworth at fourteen have lieen
acquainted with the poets of all ages and coun-
tries. — he who to his dying day coidd not endure
to read Goethe and knew nothing of Calderon ? It
seems to me rather that the earliest influence trace-
able in him is that of Goldsmith, and later of Cow-
per, and it is, perhaps, some slight indication of its
having already begun that his first volume of '* De-
scriptive Sketches " (1793) was put forth by John-
son, who was Cowper's publisher. By and by the
powerful impress of Burns is seen both in the
topics of his verse and the form of his expression.
But whatever the idtimate effect of these poets
upon his style, certain it is that his juvenile poems
were clothed in the conventional habit of the eigh-
teenth century. " The first verses from which he
remembered to have received great pleasure were
Miss Carter's ' Poem on Spring,' a poem in the six-
line stanza which he was particularly fond of and
had composed nuich in, — for example, ' Ruth.' "
This is noteworthy, for Wordsworth's lyric range,
especially so far as tune is concerned, was always
narrow. His sense of melody was i3ainfully dull,
and some of his lighter effusions, as he would have
called them, are almost ludicrously wanting in grace
of movement. We cannot expect in a modern poet
the thrush-like improvisation, the bewitchingiy im-
pulsive cadences, that charm us in our Elizabethan
drama and whose last warble died with Herrick ;
but Shelley, Tennyson, and Browning have shown
that the simple pathos of their music was not irre-

370 WORDSWORTH

coverable, even if the artless poignancy of their
phrase be gone beyond recall. We feel this lack
in Wordsworth all the more keenly if we compare
such verses as

" Like an army defeated
The snow hath retreated
And now doth fare ill
On the top of the bare hill,"

with Goethe's exquisite Ueher alien Gipfeln ist
RuJi^ in which the lines (as if shaken down by a
momentary breeze of emotion) drop lingeringly
one after another like blossoms upon turf.

The " Evening W^alk " and " Descriptive
Sketches " show plainly the prevailing influence
of Goldsmith, both in the turn of thought and the
mechanism of the verse. They lack altogether the
temperance of tone and judgment in selection whicli
have made the " Traveller " and the " Deserted
Village," perhaps, the most truly classical poems in
the language. They bear here and there, how ever,
the unmistakable stamp of the maturer Words-
worth, not only in a certain blunt realism, but in the
intensity and truth of picturesque epithet. Of
this realism, from which Wordsw'oi'th never wholly
freed himself, the following verses may suffice as a
specimen. After describing the fate of a chamois-
hunter killed by falling from a crag, his fancy goes
back to the bereaved wife and son : —

" Haply that child in fearful douht may gaze,
Passing his father's bones in future days.
Start at the reliques of that very thigh
On which so oft he pi-attled when a boy."

WORDSWORTH 371

In these poems there is plenty of tliat " poetic dic-
tion" against whieli Wordsworth was to lead the
revolt nine years later.

" To wet the peak's impracticable sides
He opens of his feet the sang-uine tides,
Weak and more weak the issning current eyes
Lapped by the panting tongue of thirsty skies."

Both of these passages have disappeared from the
revised edition, as well as some curious outbursts
of that motiveless despair which Byron made fash-
ionable not long after. Nor are there wanting
touches of fleshliness which strike us oddly as com-
ing from Wordsworth.^

'■ Farewell ! those forms that in thy noontide shade
Rest near their little plots of oaten glade,
Those steadfast eyes that beating breasts inspire
To throw the ' sultry ray ' of young Desire ;
Those lips whose tides of fragrance come and go
Accordant to the cheek's unquiet glow ;
Those shadowy breasts in love's soft light arrayed,
And rising by the moon of passion swayed.''

The political tone is also mildened in the revision,
as where he changes " despot courts " into " tyr-
anny." One of the alterations is interesting. In
the " Evening Walk " he had originally written

" And bids her soldier come her wars to share
Asleep on Minden's chamel hill afar."

An erratum at the end directs us to correct the
second verse, thus : —

^ Wordsworth's purity afterwards grew sensitive almost to pru-
dery. The late Mr. Clough told me that he heard him at Dr.
Arnold's table denounce the first line in Keats's Ode to a Grecian
Urn as indecent, and Haydon records that when he saw the group
of Cupid and Psyche he exclaimed, "The dev-ils ! "

372 WORDSWORTH

" Asleep on Bunker's charnel hill afar." ^

Wordsworth somewhere rebukes the poets for mak-
ing the owl a bodeful bird. He had himself done
so in the " Evening AValk," and corrects his epi-
thets to suit his later judgment, putting " gladsome "
for " boding," and replacing .

" The tremulous sob of the complaining owl"

by

" The sportive outcry of the mocking owl."

Indeed, the character of the two poems is so much
changed in the revision as to make the dates ap-
pended to them a misleading anachronism. But
there is one truly Wordsworthian passage which
already gives us a glimpse of that passion with
which he was the first to irradiate descriptive po-
etry, and which sets him on a level with Turner.

*' 'T is storm ; and hid in mist from horn' to hour
All day the floods a deepening- murmur pour ;
The sky is veiled and every cheerful sight ;
Dark is the region as with coming night ;
But what a sudden burst of overpowering light !
Triumphant on the bosom of the storm,
Glances the fire-clad eagle's wheeling form ;
Eastward, in long prospective glittering shine
The wood-crowned cliffs that o'er the lake recline ;
Those eastern cliffs a hundred streams unfold.
At once to pillars turned that flame with gold ;
Behind his sail the peasant tries to shun
The West that burns like one dilated sun,
Where in a mighty crucible expire
The mountains, glowing hot like coals of fire."

' The whole passage is omitted in the revised edition. The
original, a quarto pamphlet, is now very rare, but fortunately
Charles Lamb's copy of it is now owned by my friend Professor
C. E. Norton.

WORDSWORTH 373

Wordsworth has made only one change in these
verses, and that for the worse, by substitut-
ing '"glorious" (which was already implied in
" glances " and '* fireclad ") for " wheeling." In
later life he would have found it hard to forgive
the man who should have made cliffs recline over
a lake. On the whole, what strikes us as most
pro])hetic in these poems is their want of continuity,
and the purple patches of true poetry on a texture
of unmistakable prose : perhaps we might add the
incongruous clothing of prose thoughts in the cere-
monial robes of poesy.

During the same year (1793) he wrote, but did
not publish, a political tract, in which he avowed
himself opposed to monarchy and to the hereditary
principle, and desirous of a republic, if it could be
had without a revolution. He probably continued
to be all his life in favor of that ideal republic
"which never was on land or sea," but fortunately
he gave up politics that he might devote himself to
his own nobler calling, to which politics are subor-
dinate, and for which he found freedom enough in
England as it was.^ Dr. Wordsworth admits that

^ Wordsworth showed his habitual good sense in never sharing,
so far as is known, the communistic dreams of liis friends Cole-
ridge and Southey. The latter of the two had, to be sure, renounced
them shortly after his marriage, and before his acquaintance
with Wordsworth began. But Coleridge seems to have clung to
them longer. There is a passage in one of his letters to Cottle
(without date, but apparently written in the spring of 1798) which
•would imply that Wordsworth had been accused of some kind of
social heresy. " Wordsworth has been caballed against so long
and so loudly that he has found it impossible to prevail on the
tenant of the Allf oxden estate to let him the house after their first

374 WORDS WORTH

his uncle's opinions were clemocratical so late as
1802. I suspect that they remained so in an eso-
teric way to the end of his days. He had himself
suffered by the arbitrary selfishness of a great land-
holder, and he was born and bred in a part of Eng-
land where there is a greater social equality than
elsewhere. The look and manner of the Cumber-
land people especially are such as recall very viv-
idly to a New Englander the associations of fifty
years ago, ere the change from New England to
New Ireland had begun. But meanwhile, Want,
which makes no distinctions of Monarchist or Re-
publican, was pressing upon him. The debt due to
his father's estate had not been paid, and Words-
worth was one of those rare idealists who esteem it
the first duty of a friend of humanity to live for,
and not on, his neighbor. He at first proposed es-
tablishing a periodical journal to be called "The
Philanthropist," but luckily went no further with
it, for the receipts from an organ of opinion which
professed republicanism, and at the same time dis-
countenanced the plans of all existing or defunct
republicans, would have been necessarily scanty.
There being no appearance of any demand, present
or prospective, for philanthropists, he tried to get

agreement is expired." Perhaps, after all, it was Wordsworth's
insulation of character and habitual want of sympathy with any-
thing but the moods of his own mind that rendered him incapable
of tills copartnery of enthusiasm. He appears to have regarded
even his sister Dorothy (whom he certainly loved as much as it
was possible for him to love anything but his own poems) as a
kind of ti'ibutary dependency of his genius, much as a mountain
might look down on one of its ancillary spurs.

WORDSWORTH 375

emplo}nnent as oorrespondeiit of a newspaper.
Here also it was impossible that he shoiikl succeed ;
he was too great to be merged in the editorial AVe,
and had too well defined a private opinion on all
subjects to be able to express that average of public
opinion which constitutes able editorials. But so it
is that to the prophet in the wilderness the birds
of ill omen are already on the wing with food from
heaven ; and while Wordsworth's relatives were
getting impatient at what they considered his waste
of time, while one thought he had gifts enough to
make a good parson, and another lamented the rare
attorney that was lost in him,^ the prescient muse
guided the hand of Raisley Calvert while he wrote

^ Speaking to one of his neighbors in 184") he said, " that, after
he had finished his college course, he was in great doubt as to
•what his future employment should be. He did not feel himself
good enough for the Church ; he felt that his mind was not prop-
erly disciplined for that holy office, and that the struggle between
his conscience and his impulses would have made life a torture.
He also shrank from the Law, although Southey often told him
that he was well fitted for the higher parts of the profession. He
had studied military history with great interest, and the strategy
of war ; and he always fancied that he had talents for command ;
and he at one time thought of a military life, but then he was
without connections, and he felt, if he were ordered to the West
Indies, his talents would not save him from the yellow-fever, and
he gave that up." {Memoirs, ii. 46(3.) It is curious to fancy
Wordsworth a soldier. Certain points of likeness between him
and Wellington have often struck me. They resemble each
other in practical good sense, fidelity to duty, courage, and also in
a kind of precise uprightness which made their personal character
somewhat uninteresting. But what was decorum in Wellington
was piety in Wordsworth, and the entire absence of imagination
Jthe great point of dissimilarity) perhaps helped as mnch as
anything to make Wellington a great commander.

o76 WORDSWORTH

the poet's name in his will for a legacy of ,£900.
By the death of Calvert, in 1795, this timely help
came to Wordsworth at the turning-point of his
life, and made it honest for him to write poems
that will never die, instead of theatrical critiques
as ephemeral as play-bills, or leaders that led only
to oblivion.

In the autumn of 1795 Wordsworth and his sis-
ter took up their abode at Racedown Lodge, near
Crewkerne, in Dorsetshire. Here nearly two years
were passed, chiefly in the study of poetry, and
Wordsworth to some extent recovered from the
fierce disappointment of his political dreams, and
regained that equable tenor of mind which alone
is consistent with a healthy productiveness. Here
Coleridge, who had contrived to see something
more in the " Descriptive Sketches " tlian the pub-
lic had discovered there, first made his acquaint-
ance. The sympathy and appreciation of an in-
tellect like Coleridge's supplied him with that
external motive to acti\nty which is the chief use
of popularity, and justified to him his opinion of
his own powers. It was now that the tragedy of
" The Borderers " was for the most part written,
and that plan of the " Lyrical Ballads " suggested
which gave Wordsworth a clue to lead him out of
the metaphysical labyrinth in which he was entan-
gled. It was agreed between the two young friends,
that Wordsworth was to be a philosophic poet,
and, by a good fortune uncommon to such con-
spiracies. Nature had already consented to the ar-
rangement. In July, 1797, the two Wordsworths

WORDSWORTH 377

removed to Allfoxden in Soniersetsliire, that they
might be neai* Coleri(%e, who in the mean while
hail marrieil and settled himself at Nether-Stowey.
In November "' The Borderers " was finished, and
Wordsworth went np to London with his sister to
offer it for the stage. The good Genius of the
poet again interposing, the play was decisively re-
jected, and Wordsworth went back to Allfoxden,
himself the hero of that first tragi-comedy so com-
mon to young authors.

The play has fine passages, but is as unreal
as " Jane Eyre." It shares with many of Words-
worth's narrative poems the defect of being written
to illustrate an abstract moral theory, so that the
overbearing thesis is continually thrusting the poe-
try to the wall. Applied to the drama, such pre-
destination makes all the personages puppets and
disenables them for being characters. Wordsworth
seems to have felt this when he published " The
Borderers " in 1842, and says in a note that it was
" at first written . . . without any view to its ex-
hibition upon the stage." But he was mistaken.
The contemporaneous letters of Coleridge to Cottle
show that he was long in giving up the hope of
getting it accepted by some theatrical manager.

He now applied himself to the preparation of
the first volume of the " Lyrical Ballads " for the
press, and it was published toward the close of
1798. The book, which contained also " The An-
cient Mariner " of Coleridge, attracted little notice,
and that in great part contemptuous. When Mr.
Cottle, the publisher, shortly after sold his copy-

378 WORDSWORTH

rights to Mr. Longman, that of the " Lyrical Bal-
lads" was reckoned at zero, and it was at last
given up to the authors. A few persons were not
wanting, however, who discovered the dawn-streaks
of a new day in that light which the critical fire-
brigade thought to extinguish with a few contemp-
tuous spurts of cold water,^

Lord Byron describes himself as waking one
morning and finding himself famous, and it is quite
an ordinary fact that a blaze may be made with a
little saltpetre that will be stared at by thousands
who would have thoiight the sunrise tedious. If we
may believe his biographer, Wordsworth might have
said that he awoke and found himself in-famous,
for the publication of the " Lyrical Ballads " un-
doubtedly raised him to the distinction of being
the least popular poet in England. Parnassus has
two peaks ; the one where improvising poets clus-
ter ; the other where the singer of deep secrets sits
alone, — a peak veiled sometimes from the whole
morning of a generation by earth-born mists and

^ Cottle says, " The sale was so slow and the severity of most of
the reviews so great that its progress to oblivion seemed to be
certain." But the notices in the Monthly and Critical reviews
(then the most influential) were fair, and indeed favorable, espe-
cially to Wordsworth's share in the volume. The Monthly says,
'' So much genius and originality are discovered in this publication
that we wish to see another from the same hand." The Critical,
after saying that "in the whole range of English poetry we
scarcely recollect anything superior to a passage in Lines tvritten
near Tinier n Abbey, ^' suras up thus : " Yet every piece discovers
genius ; and ill as the author has frequently employed his talents,
they certainly rank him with the best of living poets.'' Such
treatment surely cannot be called discouraging.

wuj:i)S]vonTF[ 37;>

smoko of kitc'lion fires, only to glow the more eon-
seioiisly at sunset, and after nij^htfall to crown it-
self with imperishable stars. Wordsworth had
that self-trust which in the man of genius is sub-
lime, and in the man of talent insufferable. It
mattered not to him though all the reviewers had
been in a chorus of laughter or a conspiracy of
silence behind him. He went quietly over to Ger-
many to write more Lyrical Ballads, and to begin
a poeni on the gro\\i;li of his own mind, at a time
when there were only two men in the world (him-
self and Coleridge) who were aware that he had
one in anywise differing from those, mechanically
uniform, which are stuck drearily, side by side, in
the great pin-paper of society.

In Germany Wordsworth dined in company with
Klopstock, and after dinner they had a conver-
sation, of which Wordsworth took notes. The re-
spectable old poet, who was passing the evening
of his days by the chimney-corner, Darby and Joan
like, with his respectable Muse, seems to have been
rather bewildered by the apparition of a living
genius. The record is of value now chiefly for the
insight it gives us into Wordsworth's mind. Among
other things he said, " that it was the province of
a great poet to raise people up to his own level,
not to descend to theirs," — memorable words, the
more memorable that a literary life of sixty years
was in keeping with them.

It would be instructive to know what were
Wordsworth's studies during his winter in Goslar.
De Quincey's statement is mere conjecture. It

380 WORDSWORTH

may be gixessed fairly enou<;li tliat he would seek
an entram-e to the Genuaii language by the easy
path of the ballad, a course likely to confirm him
in his theories as to the language of 2>oetry. The
Spinozism with which he has been not unjustly
charged was certainly not due to any German in-
fluence, for it appears unniistakaljly in the "Lines
composed at Tintern Abbey " in July, 1798. It
is more likely to have been derived from his talks
with Coleridge in 1797.^ Wlien Emerson visited
him in 1833, he spoke with loathing of " AVilhelm
Meister," a part of which he had read in Carlyle's
translation apparently. There was some affecta-
tion in this, it should seem, for he had read Smol-
lett. On the whole, it may be fairly concluded that
the help of Germany in the development of his
genius may be reckoned as very small, though
there is certainly a marked resemblance both in
form and sentiment between some of his earlier
lyrics and those of Goethe. His poem of the
" Thorn," though vastly more imaginative, may
have been suggested by Biirger's JPfarrers Tochter
von TauhenJiain. The little grave drei Spa/men
lang, in its conscientious measurement, certainly
recalls a famous couplet in the English poem.

After spending the winter at Goslar, AVords-
worth and his sister returned to England in the

* A very improbable story of Coleridge's in the Biographia
Literaria represents the tw'o friends as having incnrred a suspicion
of treasonable dealings with tlie French enemy by their constant
references to a certain "Spy Nosey." The story at least seems
to show how they pronounced the name, which was exactly in ac-
cordance with the usage of the last generation in New England.

n'ORDswonrji 881

spring of 1799, and settled at Grasmere in West^
moreland. In 1800, the first edition of the "Lyri-
cal Ballads '" being exhausted, it was republished
with the addition of another volume, Mr. Long-
man paying XlOO for the copyright of two editions.
The book passed to a second edition in 1802, and
to a third in 1805.^ Wordsworth sent a copy of it,
with a manly letter, to Mr. Fox, particularly rec-
ommending to his attention the poems " Michael "
and " The Brothers," as displaying the strength
and permanence among a simple and rural popida-
tion of those domestic affections which were cer-
tain to decay gradually under the influence of
manufactories and poor-houses. Mr. Fox wrote
a civil acknowledgment, saying that his favorites
among the poems were " Harry Gill," " We are
Seven," "The Mad Mother," and "The Idiot,"
but that he was prepossessed against the use of
blank-verse for simple subjects. Any political sig-
nificance in the poems he was apparently unable to
see. To this second edition Wordsworth prefixed
an argumentative Preface, in which he nailed to
the door of the cathedral of English song the criti-
cal theses which he was to maintain against all
comers in his poetry and his life. It was a new
thing for an author to undertake to show the good-

^ Wordsworth found (as other original minds have since done)
a hearing- in America sooner than in England. James Humplireys,
a Philadelphia bookseller, was encouraged by a sufficient list of
subscribers to reprint the first edition of the Lyrical Ballads.
The second English edition, however, having been published be-
fore he had wholly completed his reprinting, was substantially
followed in the first American, whicb was published in 1802.

382 WORDSWORTH

ness of his verses by the logic and learniiif^ of his
prose ; but Wordsworth carried to the reform of
poetry all that fervor and faith which had lost
their political object, and it is another proof of the
sincerity and greatness of his mind, and of that
heroic simplicity which is their concomitant, that
he could do so calmly what was sure to seem ludi-
crous to the greater number of his readers. Fifty
years have since demonstrated that the true judg-
ment of one man outweighs any counterpoise of
false judgment, and that the faith of mankind is
guided to a man only by a well-founded faith in
himself. To this Defensio Wordsworth afterward
added a supplement, and the two form a treatise
of permanent value for philosophic statement and
decorous English. Their only ill effect has been,
that they have encouraged many otherwise deserv-
ing young men to set a Sibylline value on their
verses in proportion as they were unsalable. The
strength of an arjjument for self-reliance drawn
from the example of a great man depends wholly
on the greatness of him who uses it; such argu-
ments being like coats of mail, which, though they
serve the strong against arrow-flights and lance-
thrusts, may only suffocate the weak or sink him
the sooner in the waters of oblivion.

An advertisement prefixed to the " Lyrical Bal-
lads," as originally published in one volume, warned
the reader that " they were written chiefly with a
view to ascertain how far the language of cojiver-
sation in the middle and lower classes of society
is adapted to the purposes of poetic pleasure."

WORDSWORTH 883

In his preface to the seeoncl edition, in two vol-
lunes, Wordsworth ahvady found liiuiself forced to
shift his ground a little (perhaps in deference to
the wider view and finer sense of Coleridge), and
now says of the former volume that " it was pub-
lished as an experiment which, I hoped, might be
of some use to ascertain how far, by fitting to met-
rical arrangement, a selection of the real language
of men in a state of vivid sensation^ that sort of
pleasiu-e and that quantity of pleasure may be im-
parted which a poet may rationally endeavor to
impart." ^ Here is evidence of a retreat towards a
safer position, though Wordsworth seems to have
remained unconvinced at heart, and for many years
longer clung obstinately to the passages of bald
prose into which his original theory had betrayed
him. In 1815 his opinions had undergone a still
further change, and an assiduous study of the qual-
ities of his own mind and of his own poetic method
(the two subjects in which alone he was ever a
thorough scholar) had convinced him that poetry
was in no sense that appeal to the understanding
which is implied by the words " rationally endeavor
to impart." In the preface of that year he says,
" The observations prefixed to that portion of these
volumes which was published many years ago under
the title of ' Lyrical Ballads ' have so little of spe-
cial application to the greater part of the present
enlarged and diversified collection, that they could

^ Some of the weif^litiest passajjes in this Preface, as it is now
printed, were inserted without notice of date in the edition of
1815.

^84 WORDSWORTH

not with ])ro])rIety stand as an introduction to it."
It is a i)ity that he could not have become an ear-
lier convert to Coleridge's pithy definition, that
" prose was words in their Lest order, and poetry
the best words in the best order." But idealization
was something that Wordsworth was obliged to
learn painfully. It did not come to him naturally,
as to Spenser and Shelley, and to Coleridge in his
higher moods. Moreover, it was in the too fre-
quent choice of subjects incapable of being ideal-
ized without a manifest jar between theme and
treatment that Wordsworth's great mistake lay.
For example, in " The Blind Highland Boy " he
had originally the following stanzas : —

" Strong is the current, but be mild,
Ye waves, and spare the helpless child I
If ye in anger fret or chafe,
A bee-hive would be shii) as safe
As that in which he sails.

" But say, what was it ? Thought of fear!
Well may ye tremble when ye hear !
— A household tub like one of those
Which women use to wash their clothes,
This carried the blind boy."

In endeavoring to get rid of the downright vul-
garity of phrase in the last stanza, Wordsworth in-
vents an impossible tortoise-shell, and thus robs his
story of the reality which alone gave it a living in-
terest. Any extemporized raft would have floated
the boy down to immortality. But Wordsworth
never quite learned the distinction betweea Fact,
which suffocates the Muse, ^nd Truth, which is the
very breath of her nosti-ils. Study and self -culture

WOli'DS WORTH 386

(lid much for hiui, but they iievei- quite satisfied
him that he was capable of uiakiuj^ a mistake, lie
yielded silently to friendly remonstrance on cer-
tain points, and gave up, for example, the ludi-
crous exactness of

'■ I 've measured it from side to side,
'T is three feet long and two feet wide."

But I doubt if he was ever really convinced, and to
his dying day he could never quite shake off that
habit of over-minute detail wliich renders the nar-
ratives of uncultivated people so tedioiis, and some-
times so distasteful.^ " Simon Lee," after his
latest revision, still contains verses like these : —

"And he is lean and he is sick ;
His body, dwindled and awry,
Rests upon ankles swollen and thick ;
His legs are thin and dry ;

Few months of life he has in store,
As he to you will tell.
For still, the more he works, the more
Do his weak ankles swell," —

which are not only prose, but bad prose, and more-
over guilty of the same fault for which Words-
worth condemned Dr. Johnson's famous parody on
the ballad-style, — that their " matter is contemp-
tible." The sonorousness of con\action with which

1 " On my alluding to the line,

' Three feet long and two feet wide,'
and confessing that I dared not read them aloud in company, he
said, ' They ought to be liked.' " (Crabb Robinson, Dtli May,
1815.) His ordinary answer to criticisms was that he considered
the power to appreciate the passage criticised as a test of the crit-
ic's capacity to judge of poetry at aE

386 WOliDSWOIlTII

Wordsworth sometimes gives utterance to common-
places of thought and trivialities of sentiment has
a ludicrous effect on the profane and even on the
faithful in unguarded moments. We are reminded
of a passage in " The Excursion " : —

"List! I heard
From yon huge breast of rock a solemn bleat,
Sent forth as if it were the mountain's voice.^^

In 1800 the friendship of Wordsworth with
Lamb began, and was thenceforward never inter-
rupted. He continued to live at Grasmere, con-
scientiously diligent in the composition of poems,
secure of finding the materials of glory within and
around him ; for his genius taught him that inspi-
ration is no product of a foreign shore, and that
no adventurer ever found it, though he wandered
as long as Ulysses. Meanwhile the appreciation
of the best minds and the gratitude of the purest
hearts gradually centred more and more towards
him. In 1802 he made a short visit to France, in
company with Miss Wordsworth, and soon after
his return to England was married to Mary Hutch-
inson, on the 4th of October of the same year. Of
the good fortune of this marriage no other proof is
needed than the purity and serenity of his poems,
and its record is to be sought nowhere else.

On the 18th of June, 1803, his first child, John,
was born, and on the 14th of August of the same
year he set out with his sister on a foot journey
into Scotland. Coleridge was their companion
during a part of this excursion, of which Miss
Wordsworth kept a full diary. In Scotland he

WORDSWORTH 387

made the aequaintaiico of Scott, who recited to him
a part of tlie '* Lay of the Last Minstrel," then in
manuscript. The travellers returned to Grasmere
on the 25th of September. It was during this
year that Wordsworth's intimacy with the excel-
lent Sir George Beaumont began. Sir George
was an amateur painter of considerable merit, and
his f riendshi]) was undoubtedly of service to Words-
worth in making him familiar with the laws of a
sister art and thus contributing to enlarge the sym-
pathies of his criticism, the tendency of which was
toward too great exclusiveness. Sir George Beau-
mont, dying in 1827, did not forego his regard for
the poet, but contrived to hold his affection in
mortmain by the legacy of an annuity of £100, to
defray the charges of a yearly journey.

In March, 1805, the poets brother, John, lost
his life by the shipwreck of the Abergavenny East-
Indiaman, of which he was captain. He was a
man of great purity and integrity, and sacrificed
himself to his sense of duty by refusing to leave
the ship till it was imjiossible to save him. Words-
worth was deeply attached to him, and felt such
grief at his death as only solitary natures like his
are capable of, though mitigated by a sense of the
heroism which was the cause of it. The need of
mental activity as affording an outlet to intense
emotion may account for the great productiveness of
this and the following year. He now completed
"The Prelude," wrote "The Wagoner," and in-
creased the number of his smaller poems enough to
fill two volumes, which were published in 1807.

388 WORDSWORTH

This collection, wLicli contained some of the
most beautiful of his shorter pieces, and among
others the incomparable Odes to Duty and on Im-
mortality, did not reach a second edirion till 1815.
The reviewers had another laugh, and rival poets
pillaged while they scoffed, particularly Byron,
among whose verses a bit of Wordsworth showed
as incongTuously as a sacred vestment on the back
of some buccaneering plunderer of an abbey.^
There was a general combination to put him down,
but on the other hand there was a powerful party
in his favor, consisting of William Wordsworth.
He not only continued in good heart himself, but,
reversing the order usual on such occasions, kept
up the spirits of his friends.^ Meanwhile the

1 Byron, then in his twentieth year, wrote a review of these
vohimes, not, on the whole, unfair. Crabh Robinson is reported
as saying that Wordsworth was indignant at the Edinburgh Re-
view''s attack on Hours of Idleness. " The young man will do
something if he goes on," he said.

- The Rev. Dr. Wordsworth has encumbered the memory of
his uncle with two volumes of Memoirs, wliich for confused drea-
riness are only matched by the Rev. Mark Noble's History of
the Protectorate House of Cromwell. It is a misfortune that his
materials were not put into the hands of Professor Reed, whose
notes to the American edition are among the most valuable parts
of it, as they certainly are the clearest. The book contains, how-
ever, some valuable letters of Wordsworth ; and those relating
to this part of his life should be read bj- every student of his
works, for the light they throw upon the principles which gov-
erned him in the composition of his poems. In a letter to Lady
Beaumont (May 21, 1807) he says, " Trouble not yourself upon
their present reception ; of what moment is that compared with
what I trust is their destiny ! — to console the afflicted, to add
sunshine to daylight by making the happy happier; to teach the
young and the gracious of every age, to see, to tliink and feel,

WORDSWORTH 389

higher order of minds among his contemporaries
had descried and acknowledged him. They see
their peer over the mist and lower simimits be-
tween.

" When Plinlimmon hath a cap,
Snowdon wots well of that.''

Wordsworth passed the ^\^nter of 1806-7 in a
house of Sir George Beaumont's, at Coleorton in
Leicestershire, the cottage at Grasmere ha\'ing be-
come too small for his increased family. On his
return to the Vale of Grasmere he rented the house
at Allan Bank, where he lived three years. Dur-
ing this period he appears to have written very
little poetry, for which his biographer assigns as a
primary reason the smokiness of the Allan Bank
chimneys. This will hardly account for the failure
of the summer crop, especially as Wordsworth com-
posed chiefly in the open air. It did not prevent
him from writing a pamphlet upon the Convention
of Ciutra, wliich was published too late to attract

and therefore to become more actively and securely virtuous;
this is their office, which I trust they will faitlif ully perform long'
after we (that is, all that is mortal of us) are mouldered in our
graves. ... To conclude, my ears are stone-dead to this idle
buzz [of hostile criticism], and my flesh as insensible as iron to
these petty sting-s ; and, after what I have Siiid. I am sure yours
•will be the same. I doubt not that you will share with me an in-
vincible confidence that my writings (and among them these little
poems) wUl cooperate with the benign tendencies in human nature
and society wherever found ; and that they will in their degree be
efficacious in making men wiser, better, and happier." Here is
an odd reversal of the ordinary relation between an unpopular
poet and his little public of admirers ; it is he who keeps up their
epirits, and supplies them with faith from his own inexhaiistible
cistern.

390 WORDSWORTH

niuoli attontion, though Lamb says that its effect
upon hiui was like that which one of Milton's
tracts might have had upon a contemporary.^ It
was at Allan Bank that Coleridge dictated "The
Friend," and Wordsworth contributed to it two
essays, one in answer to a letter of Mathetes^
(Professor Wilson), and the other on Epitaphs,
republished in the Notes to "The Excursion."
Here also he wrote his " Description of the Scen-
ery of the Lakes." Perhaps a truer explanation
of the comparative silence of Wordsworth's Muse
during these years is to be found in the intense in-
terest which he took in current events, whose va-
riety, picturesqueness, and historical significance
were enough to absorb all the energies of his imag-
ination.

In the spring of 1811 Wordsworth removed to
the Parsonage at Grasmere. Here he remained
two years, and here he had his second intimate ex-
perience of sorrow in the loss of two of his children,
Catharine and Thomas, one of whom died 4th June,
and the other 1st December, 1812.3 Early in 1813

^ " Wordsworth's pamphlet will fail of producing any general
effect, because the sentences are long and involved ; and his
friend De Quincey, who corrected the press, has rendered them
more obscure by an unusual system of punctuation." (Southey
to Scott, oOth July, 1809.) The tract is, as Southey hints, heavy.

- The first essay in the third volume of the second edition.

^ Wordsworth's children were, —

John, born ISth June, 1S03, a clergyman.

Dorothy, bom IGth August, 1804; died Oth July, 1847.

Thomas, born Kith June, 1806 ; died 1st December, 1812.

Catharine, born 0th September, 1808 ; died 4th Jime, 1812.

William, born 12th May, 1810; succeeded his father as Stamp-
Distributor.

wonDswouTii 391

he bought Kytlal Mount, and, havuig removed
thither, changed his abode no more duriu": the rest
of his life. In March of this year he was appointed
Distributor of Stamps for the county of AVestmore-
land, an office whose receipts rendered him inde-
pendent, and whose business he was able to do
by deputy, thus leaving him ample leisure for no-
bler duties. De Quincey speaks of this appoint-
ment as an instance of the remarkable good luck
which waited upon Wordsworth through his whole
life. In our view it is only another illustration of
that scripture which describes the righteous as
never forsaken. Good luck is the willing hand-
maid of upright, energetic character, and conscien-
tious observance of duty. Wordsworth owed his
nomination to the friendly exertions of the Earl of
Lonsdale, who desired to atone as far as might
be for the injustice of the first Earl, and who re-
spected the honesty of the man more than he ap-
preciated the originality of the poet.^ The Collec-
torship at Whitehaven (a more lucrative office)
was afterwards offered to Wordsworth, and de-
clined. He had enough for independence, and
wished nothing more. Still later, on the death of
the Stamp-Distributor for Cumberland, a part of
that district was annexed to Westmoreland, and

^ Good Inck (in the sense of Chance) seems properly to be the
occurrence of Opportunity to one who has neither deserved nor
knows how to use it. In such hands it commonly turns to ill luck.
Moore's Bermudan appointment is an instance of it. Wordsworth
had a sound common-sense and practical conscientiousness, which
enabled him to fill his office as well as Dr. Franklin could have
done. A fitter man could not have been found in Westmoreland.

392 WORDSWORTH

Wordsworth's income was raised to somethinjr more
than ,£1,000 a year.

In 1814 he made his second tour in Scotland,
visiting- Yarrow in company with the Ettrick
Shepherd. During this year " The Excursion "
was published, in an edition of five hundred copies,
which supi)lied the demand for six years. Another
edition of the same number of copies was published
in 1827, and not exhausted till 1834. In 1815
" The White Doe of Rylstone " appeared, and in
181G " A Letter to a Friend of Burns," in which
Wordsworth gives his opinion iipon the limits to
be observed by the biographers of literary men.
It contains many valuable suggestions, but allows
hardly scope enough for personal details, to which
he was constitutionally indifferent.^ Nearly the
same date may be ascribed to a rhymed translation
of the first three books of the iEneid, a specimen of
which was printed in the Cambridge " Philological
Museum " (1832). In 1819 " Peter Bell," written
twenty years before, was published, and, perhaps
in consequence of the ridicule of the reviewers,
found a more rapid sale than any of his previous
volumes. " The Wagoner," printed in the same
year, was less successful. His next publication was
the volume of Sonnets on the river Duddon, with
some miscellaneous poems, 1820. A tour on the
Continent in 1820 furnished the subjects for an-
other collection, published in 1822. This was fol-
lowed in the same year by the volume of " Eccle-

^ "I am not one who much or oft delight
In personjil talk."

WORDSWORTH 393

siastical Sketches." His subsequent publicatious
were " Yarrow Revisited," 1835, and the ti*agedy
of "The Borderers," 1842.

During all these years his fame was increasing
slowly but steadily, and his age gathered to itself
the reverence and the troops of friends which his
poems and the nobly simple life reflected in them
deserved. Public honors followed private appreci-
ation. In 1838 the University of Dublin conferred
upon him the degiee of D. C. L. In 1839 Oxford
did the same, and the reception of the poet (now in
his seventieth year) at the University was enthu-
siastic. In 1842 he resigned his office of Stamp-
Distributor, and Sir Robert Peel had the honor of
putting him upon the civil list for a pension of
£300. In 1843 he was appointed Laureate, ^vith
the express understanding that it was a tribute of
respect, involving no duties except such as might
be self-imposed. His only official production was
an Ode for the installation of Prince Albert as
Chancellor of the University of Cambridge. His
life was prolonged yet seven years, almost, it should
seem, that he might receive that honor which he
had truly conquered for himself by the unflinching
bravery of a literary life of half a century, unpar-
alleled for the scorn with which its labors were re-
ceived, and the victorious acknowledgment which
at last crowned them. Surviving nearly all his
contemporaries, he had, if ever any man had, a
foretaste of immortality, enjoying in a sort his own
posthumous renown, for the hardy slowness of its
growth gave a safe pledge of its durability. He

394 WORDSWORTH

died on tlie 23d of April, 1850, the anniversary of
the death of Shakespeare.

We have thus briefly sketched the life of Words-
worth, — a life uneventful even for a man of let-
ters ; a life like that of an oak, of quiet self-devel-
opment, throwing out stronger roots toward the
side whence the prevailing storm-blasts blow, and
of tougher fibre in proportion to the rocky nature
of the soil in which it grows. The life and growth
of his mind, and the influences which shaped it, are
to be looked for, even more than is the case with
most poets, in his works, for he deliberately re-
corded them there.

Of his personal characteristics little is related.
He was somewhat above the middle height, but,
according to De Quincey, of indifferent figure, the
shoulders being narrow and drooping. His finest
feature was the eye, which was gray and full of
spiritual light. Leigh Hunt says : " I never beheld
eyes that looked so inspired, so supernatural. They
were like fires, half burning, half smouldering,
with a sort of acrid fixture of regard. One might
imagine Ezekiel or Isaiah to have had such eyes."
Southey tells us that he had no sense of smell, and
Haydon that he had none of form. The best like-
ness of him, in De Quincey's judgment, is the por-
trait of Milton prefixed to Richardson's notes on
Paradise Lost. He was active in his habits, com-
posing in the open air, and generally dictating his
poems. His daily life was regular, simple, and
frugal ; his manners were dignified and kindly ;
and in his letters and recorded conversations it is

WORDSWORTH 395

remarkablo how little that was personal entered
into his judgment of contemporaries.

The true rank of Wordsworth among poets is,
perhaps, not even yet to be fairly estimated, so
hard is it to escape into the quiet hall of judgment
uninflamed by the tumult of partisanship which
besets the doors.

Coming to manhood, predetermined to be a great
poet, at a time when the artificial school of poetry
was enthroned with all the authority of long suc-
cession and undisputed legitimacy, it was almost
inevitable that Wordsworth, who, both by nature
and judgment was a rebel against the existing
order, should become a partisan. Unfortunately,
he became not only the partisan of a system, but of
William Wordsworth as its representative. Right
in general principle, he thus necessarily became
wrong in particulars. Justly convinced that great-
ness only achieves its ends by implicitly obeying
its own instincts, he perhaps reduced the following
his instincts too much to a system, mistook his own
resentments for the promptings of his natural
genius, and, compelling principle to the measure of
his o^\^l temperament or even of the controversial
exigency of the moment, fell sometimes into the
error of making naturalness itself artificial. If a
poet resolve to be original, it will end commonly in
his being merely peculiar.

Wordsworth himself departed more and more in
practice, as he grew older, from the theories which
he had laid down in his prefaces ; ^ but those theo-

^ How far he swung backward toward the school under whose

396 WORDSWORTH

ries undoubtedly had a great effect in retarding the
growth of his fame. He had carefully constructed
a pair of spectacles through which his earlier poems
were to be studied, and the public insisted on look-
ing through them at his mature works, and were
consequently unable to see fairly what required a
different focus. He forced his readers to come to
his poetry with a certain amount of conscious pre-
paration, and thus gave them beforehand the im-
pression of something like mechanical artifice, and
deprived them of the contented repose of implicit
faith. To the child a watch seems to be a living
creature ; but Wordsworth would not let his readers
be children, and did injustice to himself by giving
them an uneasy doubt whether creations which

influence he g^ew np, and toward the style ag'ainst which he had
protested so vig'orously, a few examples will show. The advocate
of the languag'e of common life has a verse in his Thanksgiving
Ode which, if one met with it by itself, he would think the achieve-
ment of some later copyist of Pope : —

" While the tubed engine [the organ] feels the inspiring blast."

And in The Italian Itinerant and the Swiss Goatherd we find a
thermometer or barometer called

" The well-wrought scale
Whose sentient tube instructs to time
A purpose to a ficlde clime."

Still worse in the Eclipse of the Sun, 1821 : —
' ' High on her speculative tower
Stood Science, waiting for the hour
When Sol was destined to endure
That darkening."
So in TTie Excursion,

*' The cold March wind raised in her tender throat
Viewless obstructions."

WORDSWORTH 397

really throbbod with the very heart's- blood of ge-
nius, and were alive with nature's life of life, were
not contrivances of wheels and springs. A natural-
ness whieli we are told to expect has lost the crown-
ing grace of nature. Tlie men who wallced in Cor-
nelius Agrippa's visionary gardens had probably
no more pleasurable emotion than that of a shallow
wonder, or an equally shallow self-satisfaction in
thinking they had hit upon the secret of the thauma-
turgy ; but to a tree that has gi'own as God willed
we come without a theory and with no botanical
predilections, enjoying it simply and thankfidly ;
or the Imagination recreates for us its past sum-
mers and winters, the birds that have nested and
sung in it, the sheep that have clustered in its
shade, the winds that have visited it, the cloud-
bergs that have drifted over it, and the snows that
have ermined it in winter. The Imagination is a
faculty that flouts at foreordination, and Words-
worth seemed to do all he could to cheat his read-
ers of her company by laying out paths with a
peremptory Do not step off the gravel I at the
opening of each, and preparing pitfalls for every
conceivable emotion, with guide-boards to tell each
when and where it must be caught.

But if these things stood in the way of immedi-
ate appreciation, he had another theory which inter-
feres more seriously with the total and permanent
effect of his poems. He was theoretically de-
termined not only to be a philosophic poet, but to
be a great philosophic poet, and to this end he
must produce an epic. Leaving aside the question

398 WORDSWORTH

whether the epic be obsolete or not, it may be
doubted whether the history of a single man's mind
is universal enough in its interest to furnish all the
requirements of the epic machinery, and it may be
more than doubted whether a poet's philosophy be
ordinary metaphysics, divisible into chapter and
section. It is rather something which is more ener-
getic in a word than in a whole treatise, and our
hearts unclose themselves instinctively at its simple
Ope7i sesame ! while they would stand firm against
the reading of the whole body of philosophy. In
point of fact, the one element of greatness which
" The Excursion " possesses indisputably is heavi-
ness. It is only the episodes that are universally
read, and the effect of these is diluted by the con-
necting and accompanying lectures on metaphy-
sics. Wordsworth had his epic mould to fill, and,
like Benvenuto Cellini in casting his Perseus, was
forced to throw in everything, debasing the metal
lest it should run short. Separated from the rest,
the episodes are perfect poems in their kind, and
without example in the language.

Wordsworth, like most solitary men of strong
minds, was a good critic of the substance of poetry,
but somewhat niggardly in the allowance he made
for those subsidiary qualities which make it the
charmer of leisure and the employment of minds
without definite object. It may be doubted, in-
deed, whether he set much store by any contempo-
rary wi-iting but his o^\T^, and whether he did not
look i\pon poetry too exclusively as an exercise
rather of the intellect than as a nepenthe of the

WORDSWORTH 399

iiuaj^ination.^ lie says of himself, speaking of his

youth : —

" In fine,
I was a better jiidg'e of thoug-hts than H'ords,
Misled in estimating' words, not only
By common inexperience of youth,
But by the trade in classic niceties.
The dangerous craft of culling term and phrase
From languages tliat want the living voice
To carry meaning to the natural heart ;
To tell us what is passion, what is truth,
What reason, what simplicity and sense." '

Though he here speaks in the preterite tense, this
was always true of him, and his thought seems
often to lean upon a word too weak to bear its
weight. No reader of adequate insight can help
regretting that he did not earlier give himself to
"the trade of classic niceties." It was precisely
this which gives to the blank-verse of Landor the
severe dignity and reserved force which alone
among later poets recall the tune of Milton, and
to which Wordswoi-th never attained. Indeed,
Wordsworth's blank-verse (though the passion be
profounder) is always essentially that of Cowper.
They were alike also in their love of outward na-
ture and of simple things. The main difference
between them is one of scenery rather than of sen-
timent, between the life-long familiar of the moun-
tains and the dweller on the plain.

It cannot be denied that in Wordsworth the
very highest powers of the poetic mind were asso-

^ According to Lander, he pronounced all Scott's poetry to be
" not worth five shilling's."
2 Prelude, Book VI.

400 WORDSWORTH

ciated with a certain tendency to the diffuse and
commonplace. It is in the understanding (always
prosaic) that the great golden veins of his imagi-
nation are imbedded.^ He wrote too much to
wi'ite always well; for it is not a great Xerxes-
army of words, but a compact Greek ten thousand,
that march safely down to posteiity. He set tasks
to his divine faculty, which is much the same as
trying to make Jove's eagle do the service of a
clucking hen. Throughout " The Prelude " and
*' The Excursion " he seems striving to bind the
wizard Imagination with the sand-ropes of dry dis-
quisition, and to have forgotten the potent spell-
word which would make the particles cohere. There
is an arenaceous quality in the style which makes
progress wearisome. Yet with what sjjlendors as
of mountain-sunsets are we rewarded ! what golden
rounds of verse do we not see stretcliing heaven-
ward with angels ascending and descending ! what
haunting harmonies hover around us deep and
eternal like the undying barytone of the sea! and
if we are compelled to fare through sands and
desert wildernesses, how often do we not hear airy
shapes that syllable our names with a startling

1 This was Instinctively felt, even by liis admirers. Miss Mar-
tineau said to Crabb Robinson in 18;39, speaking- of Wordsworth's
conversation : " Sometimes he is annoying- from the pertinacity
■with which he dwells on trifles ; at other times he flows on in the
utmost grandeur, leaving a strong- impression of inspiration."
Robinson tells us that he read Resolution and Independence to a
lady who was affected by it even to tears, and then said, " I have
not heard anything for years that so much delighted me ; but,
a/ttr all, it is not poetri/."

k

WORDSWORTH 401

personal appeal to our highest consciousness and
our noblest aspiration, such as we wait for in vain
in any other poet ! Landor, in a letter to Miss
Holford, says admirably of him, '* Common minds
alone can be ignorant what breadth of jjhilos-
ophy, what energy- and intensity of thought, what
insight into the heart, and what observation of
nature are requisite for the production of such
poetry."

Take from Wordsworth all wliicli an honest crit-
icism cannot but allow, and what is left wdll show
how tridy great he was. He had no humor, no
dramatic power, and his temperament was of that
dry and juiceless qiiality, that in all his published
correspondence you shall not fuid a letter, but only
essays. If we consider carefully where he was
most successful, we shall find that it was not so
much in description of natural scenery, or deline-
ation of character, as in vivid expression of the
effect produced by external objects and events
upon his own mind, and of the shaj^e and hue (per-
haps momentary) which they in turn took from his
mood or temperament. His finest passages are
always monologues. He had a fondness for par-
ticulars, and there are parts of his poems which
remind us of local histories in the undue relative
importance given to trivial matters. He was the
historian of AVordsworthshire. This power of par-
ticularization (for it is as tndy a power as general-
ization) is what gives such vigor and greatness to
single lines and sentiments of Wordsworth, and to
poems developing a single thought or sentiment.

402 WORDSWORTH

It was this that made him so fond of the sonnet.
That sequestered nook forced upon him the limits
which his f ecimdity (if I may not say his garrulity)
was never self-denying enough to impose on itself.
It suits his solitary and meditative temper, and it
was there that Lamb (an admirable judge of what
was permanent in literature) liked him best. Its
narrow boimds, but fourteen paces from end to
end, turn into a virtue his too common fault of giv-
ing undue prominence to every passing emotion.
He excels in monologue, and the law of the sonnet
tempers monologue with mercy. In " The Excur-
sion " we are driven to the subterfuge of a French
verdict of extenuating circumstances. His mind
had not that reach and elemental movement of
Milton's, which, like the trade-wind, gathered to
itself thoughts and images like stately fleets from
every quarter ; some deep with silks and spicery,
some brooding over the silent thunders of their bat-
tailous armaments, but all swept forward in their
destined track, over the long billows of his verse,
every inch of canvas strained by the unifying breath
of their common epic impulse. It was an organ
that Milton mastered, mighty in compass, capable
equally of the trumpet's ardors or the slim deli-
cacy of the flute, and sometimes it bursts forth in
great crashes through his prose, as if he toiiched it
for solace in the intervals of his toil. If Words-
worth sometimes put the trumpet to his lips, yet
he lays it aside soon and willingly for his appro-
priate instrument, the pastoral reed. And it is
not one that grew by any vidgar stream, but that

WORDSWORTH 403

which Apollo breathed through, toiuling; tlie flocks
of Atlmetus, — that which Pan endowed with every
melody of the visible universe, — the same in which
the sold of the despairing nymph took refuge and
gifted with her dual nature, — so that ever and
anon, amid the notes of human joy or sorrow, there/
comes suddenly a deejier and almost aw^ful tone,
thrilling us into dim consciousness of a forgotten
dignity.

Wordsworth's absolute want of humor, while it
no doubt confirmed his self-confidence by making
him insensible both to the comical incongrmty into
which he was often led by his earlier theory con-
cerning the language of poetry and to the not un-
natural ridicule called forth by it, seems to have
been indicative of a certain dulness of perception
in other directions.^ We cannot help feeling that

^ Nowhere is this displayed with more comic self-complacency
than when he thought it needful to rewrite the ballad of Helen of
Kirconnel, — a poem hardly to be matched in any language for
swiftness of movement and savage sincerity of feeling. Its shud-
dering compression is masterly.

" Cui-st be the heart that thought the thought,
And curst the hand that fixed the shot,
When in my arms burd Helen dropt,
That died to succor me !

O, think ye not my heart was sair

When my love dropt down and spake na mair ? **

Compare this with, —

" Proud Gordon cannot bear the thoughts
Tliat through his brain are travelling,
And, starting up, to Bruce's heart
He launched a deadly javelin;

404 WORDSWORTH

the material of lils nature was essentially prose,
which, in his inspired moments, he had the power
of transmuting, but which, whenever the inspira-
tion failed or was factitious, remained obstinately
leaden. The normal condition of many poets would
seem to approach that temperature to which Words-
Fair Ellen saw it when it came,
And, stepping forth to meet the same.
Did with her body cover
The Youth, her chosen lover.

And Bruce {as soon as he had slain

The Gordon) sailed away to Spain,

And foug-ht with rage incessant

Against the Moorish Crescent."
These are surely the verses of an attorney's clerk "penning a
stanza when he should engToss." It will be noticed that Words-
worth here also departs from his earlier theory of the language of
poetry by substituting a javelin for a bullet as less modern and
familiar. Had he written, —

" And Gordon never gave a hint,

But, having somewhat picked his flint,

Let fly the fatal bullet

That killed that lovely pullet,"
it would hardly have seemed more like a parody than the rest.
He shows the same insensibility in a note upon the Ancient Mari-
ner in the second edition of the Lyrical Ballads : ' ' The poem of
my friend has indeed great defects ; first, that the principal per-
son has no distinct character, either in his profession of mariner,
or as a human being who, having been long under the control of
supernatural impressions, might be supposed himself to partake
of something supernatural ; secondly, that he does not act, but is
continually acted upon ; thirdly, that the events, having no neces-
sary connection, do not produce each other ; and lastly, that the
imagery is somewhat laboriously accumulated. " Here is an in-
dictment, to be sure, and drawn, plainly enough, by the attorney's
clerk aforenamed. One would think that tlie strange charm of
Coleridge's most truly original poems lay in this very emancipa-
tion from the laws of cause and effect.

WORDSWORTH 405

■svortli's mind coidd be raised only by the white
heat of profoundly inward passion. And in pro-
portion to the intensity needful to make his nature
thoroughly aglow is the very high quality of his
best verses. They seem rather the productions of
nature than of man, and have the lastingness of
such, delighting our age with the same startle of
newness and beauty that pleased our youth. Is it
his thought ? It has the shifting inward lustre of
diamond. Is it his feeling ? It is as delicate as the
impressions of fossil ferns. He seems to have
caught and fixed forever in immutable grace the
most evanescent and intangible of our intuitions,
the very ripple-marks on the remotest shores of
being. But this intensity of mood which insiu'es
high quality is by its very nature incapable of pro-
longation, and Wordsworth, in endeavoring it,
falls more below himself, and is, more even than
many poets his inferiors in imaginative quality, a
poet of passages. Indeed, one cannot help having
the feeling sometimes that the poem is there for
the sake of these passages, rather than that these
are the natural jets and elations of a mind ener-
gized by the rapidity of its own motion. In other
words, the happy couplet or gracious image seems
not to spring from the inspiration of the poem con-
ceived as a whole, but rather to have dropped of
itself into the mind of the poet in one of his ram-
bles, who then, in a less rapt mood, has patiently
built up around it a setting of verse too often un-
graceful in form and of a material whose cheapness
may cast a doubt on the priceless quality of the

406 WORDSWORTH

gem it encumbers.^ During the most happily pro-
ductive period of his life, Wordsworth was impa-
tient of what may be called the mechanical portion
of his art. His wife and sister seem from the first
to have been his scribes. In later years, he had
learned and often insi.ited on the truth that poetry
was an art no less than a gift, and corrected his
poems in cold blood, sometimes to their detriment.
But he certainly had more of the vision than of the
faculty divine, and was always a little numb on the
side of form and proportion. Perhaps his best
poem in these respects is the " Laodamia," and it
is not uninstructive to learn from his own lips that
" it cost him more trouble than almost anything of
equal length he had ever written." His longer
poems (miscalled epical) have no more intimate
bond of union than their more or less immediate
relation to his own personality. Of character
other than his own he had but a faint conception,
and all the personages of "The Excursion'' that
are not Wordsworth are the merest shadows of
himself upon mist, for his self-concentrated nature
was incapable of projecting itself into the conscious-
ness of other men and seeing the springs of action
at their source in the recesses of individual charac-
ter. The best parts of these longer poems are
bursts of impassioned soliloquy, and his fingers were

^ " A hundred times ■when, roving high and low,
I have been harassed with the toil of verse,
Much pains and little progress, and at once
Some lovely Image in the song rose up,
Full-formed, like Venus rising from the sea."

Prelude, Book IV.

WORDSWORTH 407

always clumsy at tlic caUidajunctnra. Tlie stream
of narration is sluggish, if varied by times with
pleasing reflections Qviridesque placido cequore
sylvas^ ; we are forced to do our own rowing, and
only when the current is hemmed in by some nar-
row gorge of the poet's personal consciousness do
we feel ourselves snatched along on the smooth but
impetuous rush of unmistakable inspiration. The
fact that what is precious in Wordsworth's poetry
was (more tridy even than with some greater poets
than he) a gift rather than an achievement should
always be borne in mind in taking the measure of
his power. I know not whether to call it height or
depth, this peculiarity of his, but it certainly en-
dows those parts of his work which we should dis-
tinguish as Wordsworthian with an unexpectedness
and impressiveness of originality such as we feel
in the presence of Nature herself. He seems to
have been half conscious of this, and recited his
own poems to all comers with an enthusiasm of
wondering admiration that would have been pro-
foundly comic ^ but for its simple sincerity and
for the fact that William Wordsworth, Esquire,
of Rydal Mount, was one person, and the William
Wordsworth whom he so heartily reverenced quite
another. We recognize two voices in him, as
Stephano did in Caliban. There are Jeremiah and

' Mr. Emerson tells lis that he was at first tempted to smile,
and Mr. Ellis Yarnall (who saw him in his eightieth year) says,
'■ These quotations [from his own works] he read in a way that
ranch impressed me ; it seemed almost as if he were awed by the
greatness of his own power, the gifts with which he had been endowed."
(The italics are mine.)

408 WORDSWORTH

his scribe Barueh. If the prophet cease from dic-
tating, the amanueusis, rather than be idle, employs
his pen in jotting down some anecdotes of his mas-
ter, how he one day went ont and saw an old woman,
and the next day did not, and so came home and
dictated some verses on this ominous phenomenon,
and how another day he saw a cow. These mar-
ginal annotations have been carelessly taken up
into the text, have been religiously held by the
pious to be orthodox scripture, and by dexterous
exegesis have been made to yield deeply oracidar
meanings. Presently the real prophet takes up the
word again and speaks as one divinely inspired, the
Voice of a higher and invisible power. Words-
worth's better utterances have the bare sincerity,
the absolute abstraction from time and place, the
immunity from decay, that belong to the grand
simplicities of the Bible. They seem not more his
own than ours and every man's, the word of the
inalterable Mind. This gift of his was naturally
very much a matter of temperament, and accord-
ingly by far the greater part of his finer product
belongs to the period of his prime, ere Time had
set his lumpish foot on the pedal that deadens the
nerves of animal sensibility.^ He did not grow as
those poets do in whom the artistic sense is predom-

^ His best poetry was written when he was under the immedi-
ate influence of Coleridge. Coleridge seems to have felt this, for
it is evidently to Wordsworth that he alludes when he speaks of
" those who have been so well pleased that I should, year after
year, flow with a hundred nameless rills into their main stream.''
(Letters, Conversations, and Recollections of S. T. C-, vol. i. pp.
5-6.) " Wordsworth foimd fault with the repetition of the con-

WORDSWORTH 409

iuant. One of the most deliglitful fancies of the
Genevese humorist, Toepft'er, is the poet Albert,
who, having had his portrait drawn by a highly
idealizing hand, does his best afterwards to look
like it. Many of Wordsworth's later poems seem
like rather imsueeessful efforts to resemble his for-
mer self. They would never, as Sir John Harring-
ton says of poetry, " keep a child from play and an
old man from the chimney-corner." ^

Chief Justice Marshall once blandly interrupted
a junior counsel who was arguing certain obvi-
ous points of law at needless leng-th, by saying,
" Brother Jones, there are some things which a
Supreme Court of the United States sitting in
equity may be presumed to know." Wordsworth
has this fault of enforcing and restating obvious
points till the reader feels as if his own intelligence
were somewhat underrated. He is over-conscien-
tious in giving us full measure, and once profoundly
absorbed in the sound of his own voice, he knows
not when to stop. If he feel himself flagging, he
has a droll way of keeping the floor, as it were, by
asking himself a series of questions sometimes not

eluding sound of the participles in Shakespeare's line about bees :

' The singing masons building roofs of gold.'

This, he said, was a line tliat Milton never would have written.
Keats thought, on the other hand, that the repetition was in har-
mony with the continued note of the singers." (Leigh Hunt's
Autobiography.) Wordsworth writes to Crabb Robinson in 1S37,
" My ear is susceptible to the clashing of sounds almost to dis-
ease." One cannot help thinking that his training in these nice-
ties was begun by Coleridge.

^ In the Preface to his translation of the Orlando Furioso.

410 WORDSWORTH

needing, and often incapable of answer. There are
three stanzas of snch near the close of the First
Part of " Peter Bell," where Peter first catches a
glimpse of the dead body in the water, all happily
incongruous, and ending with one which reaches
the height of comicality : —

" Is it a fiend that to a stake
Of fire his desperate self is tethering ?
Or stubborn spirit doomed to yell,
In solitary ward or cell,
Ten thousand miles from all his brethren ? "

The same want of humor which made him insensi-
ble to incongruity may perhaps account also for the
singular unconsciousness of disproportion which so
often strikes us in his poetry. For examjDle, a little
farther on in " Peter Bell " we find : —

" Now — like a tempest-shattered bark
That overwhelmed and prostrate lies,
And in a moment to the verge
Is lifted of a foaming surge —
Full suddenly the Ass doth rise I "

And one cannot help thinking that the similes of
the huge stone, the sea-beast, and the cloud, noble
as they are in themselves, are somewhat too lofty
for the service to which they are put.^

The movement of Wordsworth's mind was too
slow and his mood too meditative for narrative
poetry. He values his own thoughts and reflections
too much to sacrifice the least of them to the inter-
ests of his story. Moreover, it is never action that
interests him, but the subtle motives that lead to or
hinder it. " The Wagoner " involuntarily suggests
^ In Resolution and Independence.

WORDSWORTH 411

a comparison witli " Tarn O'Slianter " Infinitely to
its own disadvantage. " Peter Boll," full though
it be of profound touches and subtle analysis, is
lumbering and disjointed. Even Lamb was forced
to confess that he did not like it. " The White
Doe," the most Wordsworthian of them all in the
best meaning of the epithet, is also only the more
truly so for being diffuse and reluctant. What
charms in Wordsworth and will charm forever is
the

" Happy tone
Of meditation slipping in between
The beauty coming and the beauty gone."

A few poets, in the exquisite adaptation of their
words to the tune of our own feelings and fancies,
in the charm of their manner, indefinable as the
sympathetic grace of woman, a7'e everything to us
without our being able to say that they are much
in themselves. They rather narcotize than fortify.
Wordsworth must subject our mood to his owti be-
fore he admits us to his intimacy ; but, once admit-
ted, it is for life, and we find ourselves in his debt,
not for what he has been to us in our hours of
relaxation, but for what he has done for us as a
reinforcement of faltering purpose and personal
independence of character. His system of a Na-
ture-cure, first professed by Dr. Jean Jacques and
continued by Cowper, certainly breaks down as a
whole. The Solitary of " The Excursion," who has
not been cured of his scepticism by living among
the medicinal mountains, is, so far as we can see,
equally proof against the lectures of Pedler and

412 WORDSWORTH

Parson. Wordsworth apparently felt that this
would be so, and accordingly never saw his way
clear to finishing the poem. But the treatment,
whether a panacea or not, is certainly wholesome,
inasmuch as it inculcates abstinence, exercise, and
uncontaminate air. I am not sure, indeed, that the
Nature-cure theory does not tend to foster in con-
stitutions less vigorous than Wordsworth's what
Milton would call a fugitive and cloistered \artue
at a dear expense of manlier qualities. The an-
cients and our own Elizabethans, ere spiritual me-
grims had become fashionable, perhaps made more
out of life by taking a frank delight in its action
and passion and by grappling with the facts of this
world, rather than muddling themselves over the
insoluble problems of another. If they had not
discovered the picturesque, as we understand it,
they found surprisingly fine scenery in man and his
destiny, and would have seen something ludicrous,
it may be suspected, in the spectacle of a grown
man running to hide his head in the apron of the
Mighty Mother whenever he had an ache in his
finger or got a bruise in the tussle for existence.

But when, as I have said, our impartiality has
made all those qualifications and deductions against
which even the greatest poet may not plead his
privilege, what is left to Wordsworth is enough
to justify his fame. Even w^here his genius is
wrapped in clouds, the unconquerable lightning of
imajjination struo-oles through, flashing out unex-
pected vistas, and illuminating the humdrum path-
way of our daily thought with a radiance of mo-

WORDSWORTH 413

meutary consciousness that seems like a revelation.
If it be tlie most delightful function of the poet to
set our lives to music, yet perhaps he will be even
more sure of our maturer gratitude if he do his
part also as moralist and philosopher to purify and
enlighten ; if he define and encourage our vacilla-
ting perceptions of duty ; if he piece together our
fragmentary apprehensions of our own life and that
larger life whose unconscious instruments we are,
making of the jumbled bits of our dissected map of
experience a coherent chart. In the great poets
there is an exquisite sensibility both of soul and
sense that sympathizes like gossamer sea^moss with
every movement of the element in which it floats,
but which is rooted on the solid rock of our com-
mon sympathies. Wordsworth shows less of this
finer feminine fibre of organization than one or two
of his contemporaries, notably than Coleridge or
Shelley; but he was a masculine thinker, and in
his more characteristic poems there is always a
kernel of firm conclusion from far-reaching princi-
ples that stimulates thought and challenges medi-
tation. Groping in the dark passages of life, we
come upon some axiom of his, as it were a wall
that gives us our bearings and enables us to fijid
an outlet. Compared with Goethe we feel that he
lacks that serene impartiality of mind which results
from breadth of culture ; nay, he seems narrow, in-
sular, almost provincial. He reminds us of those
saints of Dante who gather brightness by revolving
on their own axis But through this very limitation
of range he gains perhaps in intensity and the im-

414 WORDSWORTH

pressiveness which results from eagerness of per-
sonal conviction. If we read Wordsworth through,
as I have just done, we find ourselves changing
our mind about him at every other page, so uneven
is he. If we read our favorite poems or passages
only, he will seem uniformly great. And even
as regards " The Excursion " we should remember
how few long poems will bear consecutive reading.
For my part I know of but one, — the Odyssey.

None of our great poets can be called popular in
any exact sense of the word, for the highest poetry
deals with thoughts and emotions which inhabit,
like rarest sea-mosses, the doubtful limits of that
shore between our abiding divine and our fluctua-
ting human nature, rooted in the one, but living in
the other, seldom laid bare, and otherwise visible
only at exceptional moments of entire calm and
clearness. Of no other poet except Shakespeare
have so many phrases become household words as
of Wordsworth. If Pope has made current more
epigrams of worldly wisdom, to Wordsworth be-
longs the nobler praise of having defined for us,
and given us for a daily possession, those faint and
vague suggestions of other-worldliness of whose
gentle ministry with our baser nature the hurry
and bustle of life scarcely ever allowed us to be
conscious. He has won for himself a secure im-
mortality by a depth of intuition which makes only
the best minds at their best hours worthy, or indeed
capable, of his companionship, and by a homely
sincerity of human sympathy which reaches the
humblest heart. Our language owes him gratitude

WORDSWORTH 415

for the habitual purity and abstinence of his style,
and we who speak it, for having emboldened us to
take delight in simple things, and to trust ourselves
to our own instincts. And he hath his reward. It
needs not to bid

" Renowned Spenser, lie a thought more nigh
To learned Chaucer, and rare Beaumond lie
A little nearer iSpenser " ;

for there is no fear of crowding in that little soci-
etj^ with whom he is now enrolled as fifth in the
succession of the great English Poets.

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